Purple Fashion
[October 1 2018]
Junya Watanabe S/S 2019 backstage, Paris
Junya Watanabe is certainly one of the most punk rock designers, yet that doesn’t prevent him from convening his audience early in the morning and on time. These types of distinguished feelings—radical and refined—characterize his spring 2019 collection.
The set today is a bit decayed—a concrete building under rehabilitation, where the daylight comes into sight from the side of a window wall. The voice of Freddie Mercury opens the ball, and baby-doll punkettes with bright neon hair emerge dressed in patchwork denim. Denim is the principal theme of this collection, the main garment with the white T-shirt presented on stage. Emotions arouse from the varieties of shapes exposed, but here, too, Watanabe focuses uniquely on one: the dress. Where he deploys his great talent is in the manner he assembles each of them with critical fashion and unconventional manners. The result is singular, and original.
With this collection, Watanabe creates with a solitary motif a wide range of variations and—by necessity—sensations. His strength lives in the power to make the audience experience the physicality of the dress, as only a sincere and noble couturier knows how to do.
Text Dorothée Perret and photo Janna Tatarova
