Junya Watanabe, fall 2022Photo: Courtesy of Junya Watanabe
If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s another jacket. Outerwear takes up at least half of my closet, and a fair bit of my teenager’s as well (shh, don’t tell him). With so many coats and jackets of so many varieties collected over many years, I should be keeping up a fairly steady rotation, but I can go a whole winter without mixing it up much. These coats and jackets are stuffed at the back of my closet, tucked away with the ironing board and the vacuum cleaner and a couple of oversize suitcases stacked with sweaters I couldn’t squish into the overhead shelves. Daunted by the mess, I tend to wear what’s closest to my apartment door.
And yet, I can’t get this jacket from Junya Watanabe’s exemplary fall collection out of my head.
Credit its Christian Dior bar jacket shape. The nipped waist, padded hip silhouette has been a winner for 75 years and counting. Those ¾ length bell sleeves are good too. Or credit its inspired denim twill and army surplus patch-working. As my colleague Sarah Mower reported, Watanabe named the collection “the spiraling of winter ghosts,” after a subtitle of a track on an 1980s album by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay, whose collaborative noodling yielded a synergistic whole. I’m also partial to it because it reminds me a bit of a circa Y2K dark rinse denim and black athletic mesh Junya dress with a New Look-shape skirt that I mistakenly sent to resale in an attempt to clean up my aforementioned overstuffed closet. Not to self: Think twice next time.
In the end, the best thing about this jacket is that it’s so stop-you-in-your-tracks fabulous you can wear the very simplest of uniforms underneath: a black turtleneck and trousers. These I have no shortage of either, so maybe I’ll splash out on this exceptional Junya Watanabe piece after all.
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