It’s a great week for Undercover stans. Rather than just a new menswear collection, Jun Takahashi is also launching a new book, made in collaboration with the photographer Wataru. Record documents the archival behind-the-scenes moments of three of Takahashi’s fashion shows: fall 2017’s “Perfect Day,” spring 2017’s “Portrait in Jazz,” and spring 2016’s “Evil Clown.” There’s never-before-seen runway shots of collections, an inside look at styling sessions, and backstage photos of show preparation—a treasure trove for nostalgic fans. But as Takahashi offers a glimpse into his past, he continues to decisively pull us all into the future.
Spring 2024 brings an air of melancholy, rather than nostalgia, to the Undercover universe. The collection was inspired by banshees, the wailing female spirits in Irish folklore (you may have heard of them from the Oscar nominated feature The Banshees of Inisherin). A banshee heralds the death of a family member with piercing keening, and the sound portends an engulfing darkness and sadness. Takahashi conveyed those feelings with dusky elegant colors, elongated silhouettes, and a fresh outlook on deconstruction. The anchoring point, he explained via a translator, was a run of pieces featuring paintings by the artist Helen Verhoeven. “They have an element of darkness and quietness, but also a sweetness,” he said.
Like many menswear designers this season, Takahashi was ruminating on the idea of elegance. “We often use elements of street fashion and culture, but this time we toned that down a bit,” he said. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, Takahashi seems uninterested in repurposing boyish tailoring tropes or over-embellishing garments in order to dress his man up. Here, he looked at romantic yet old ornamental jacquards (eagle-eyed fans will be able to clock their provenance from previous collections) and turned them into jackets and skirts—leaving their hems raw and delineating their borders with the triangle motif he has tattooed on his sleeves. To add a modern edge, he employed vislon zippers and utility pockets.
The three capsules within the collection were also elegant. One revolved around reconstructing the white shirt, another exposed the inner constructions of tailoring (the clear taping at the seams was a just-perfect touch), and a third focused on hybridizations of the t-shirt into tailoring. After many years of tearing things apart and putting them back together differently, Takahashi is still finding ways to make the old new again.
What’s appealing about deconstruction? “I love the challenge,” he said with a smile, expanding that he likes “to make these simple garments more complicated.” In a playful way, of course. There were t-shirt short sleeves worn as hoods, rib knit collars as pocket holes and knee gussets, and collars and shoulders as lapels.
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