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Junya Watanabe

PARIS, January 18, 2008
By Tim Blanks
Parsing a Junya Watanabe collection involves careful consideration of the invitation and the venue. The former was a precisely bifurcated card, the latter was La Bourse, the historical Paris stock exchange. And, this being Watanabe, there'd have to be some element of Americana in there somewhere. A stockbroker with a split personality? Well, at a stretch, there was a sense of a buttoned-down-fit-to-burst individual in outfits as tense as a shrunken navy jacket worn with a shirt in a banker's stripe and a college tie. It was very Thom Browne-does-Tokyo. But equally, the clothes had a twisted preppiness that was the latest expression of the merry hell Junya plays with American dress codes. So glen plaid slacks boasted carpenter's loops, and a blazer sported the sleeves of a baseball jacket.

In most Junya shows, there's a moment when the planet shifts sideways and his skewed vision takes flight. It didn't happen this time. The appearance of random buttonholes, stitched in red, promised the insinuation of utilitywear into the formality of tailoring, but there wasn't really much of a buzz to be derived from that (besides, Tomas Maier had already visited this notion in Milan). Such detailing did, however, suggest that Junya was plucking memories from his repertoire: the knit back on a blazer, the shrunken duffel, the racing stripes, a jacket's paisley pajama trim. But the show was too subtle to be some kind of greatest-hits collection. In fact, it was actually repetitive enough to feel like the designer was treading water, temporarily detached from the peculiar disembodied nostalgia that makes his menswear so memorable.

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