“There are many categories, many tribes. I wanted to make it borderless. Because to eliminate conflicts, you want borders to be eliminated—that’s the metaphor. And because I work in fashion, this is how I can express that.” These words might not be precisely as Jun Takahashi said them post-show this afternoon; they’re more a paraphrased collage of his answers delivered via translator. However, they communicate the essential thrust behind an Undercover show that was the latest to approach what is fast emerging as a broader theme of this season: human unity at a moment of fracture.
Before the first look, the show was intro’d with the opening section of a just-filmed live studio performance by the band Glass Beams. Takahashi said he’d first encountered the Melbourne, Australia-based trio on YouTube: inflected in part by founder Rajan Silva’s Indian heritage, it specializes in a lyric-less, tautly meandering, sort-of psychedelic prog-funk world music. All its members perform in jeweled masks.
The closing section featured prints of Takahashi’s painted art whose subjects included a looming sphere-headed, many-tentacled entity that seemed vaguely H.G. Wells, and which the designer called “my creature.” In the opening section Takahashi seemed to consider the artist’s uniform, showing a series of loose linen jackets and high-hemmed pants in sky-blue, pink, or off-white. Straps were suspended from the jacket skirts, and the elbows, vents, and other points of physical articulation were bordered by zippers or slits. Some of the garments were printed with images of clouds, or smoke, and what looked like the house from Hitchcock’s Psycho.
On their heads, the models wore either wide-brimmed hats with fishnet veils or headpieces of golden nails or leaves above lace masks across their eyes. Most wore ornate beaded collars at their necks and intriguing little details including brightly colored and oddly placed painted buttons. Later on there was a ragged-edged skirt in what looked like an old baroque or central Asian brocade, and another in a weathered gray windowpane check under what evoked a chain-seamed Chanel jacket in a tonal black patterned jacquard. Full-length robes and trailing, metal-flecked sari-esque trains and skirts came at the end. “He wanted to provide a men’s collection which also has elements that are feminine,” reported Takahashi’s translator: “because he thinks this border is getting less and less.”
She cited the designer as referencing West Asian and Middle Eastern source material. The Champion collaboration pieces in jersey were paradigms of occidental attire. You could likely spend a chunk of time Google Lensing these collection images to much more comprehensively annotate Takahashi’s layering of cultural fabrics. But the point apparently implied by the prints of Italian artist Robert Bosisio’s paintings of nebulous, aura-like subjects that looked most like clouds was that we all live under the same sky. A work of imaginative nomadism, this collection blended a utopian confederation of globally gathered ingredients to envisage a wearable world music.
