This was a pinch-me show: one of the finest goodies of fashion month. Ciara’s runway cameo for Junya Watanabe drew whoops and cries of “Yessss!” from the audience each time she passed, wearing, respectively, a head-suspended chandelier harness-dress; a spiralized, deconstructed biker jacket; and a trench cloak. She provided the headline as Watanabe presented a collection titled Funky that used catsuits as canvases upon which to draw new expressions from familiar forms. It felt fresh.
The show had two phases, each delineated by music: Chaka Khan’s “Like Sugar” and Michael Jackson’s “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” The collection felt like an intersectional evolution of Watanabe’s most recent womenswear and menswear shows, The Art of Assemblage Couture and Bling. In fact, Ciara’s Kota Okuda–customized Red Sox cap looked lifted straight from that June menswear runway.
Watanabe applied his pragmatically anarchic lens not only to garments but also to the medium of the fashion show. Through the movement direction of Pat Boguslawski, he sampled and quasi-satirically remixed two genres of runway performance from the past. During the first Khan section, the models worked the exaggerated attitude, moues, pouts, head touching, and winks of the high-glamour runway era associated with Pat Cleveland. Jackson’s power ballad shifted the delivery to a chin-up, semi-Stepford elegance that recalled the haute couture presentations of the 1950s and ’60s.
The clothes were subjected to similar sampling and reconstruction. Watanabe began with recognizable objects and garments, then manifested innovation through interrogating what new shape each could become. A metallic breastplate exploded outward in a starburst of spikes. Another look wrapped the torso in what appeared to be a red bicycle-like frame. Circuit boards, wiring, chains, and mesh were assembled into a dress. Familiar punk stud hardware was blown up, pulled apart, or redistributed across the body. There were many riffs on the classic codes Watanabe has long enjoyed pushing against. Cropped, Chanel-ish tweed jackets were lavishly strewn with crazily proportioned pearls. More pearls migrated onto biker jackets whose zippers and panels had been liberated from their original functional placements.
The first, faster section was bouncy and extroverted. Then “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” tempered the tempo against a backdrop of dry ice. Trench coats became dresses and capes, tailored jackets were disassembled and refitted. There was a shiny black version of section one’s monumental matte metallic exploding breastplate. Long, stately dresses were shown as if X-rayed, the boning of their corsetry visible. Crochet knits played down the torso like a rib cage. This section was a retrospective investigation of long-gone couture tropes presented with huge verve and wit, ably supported by the brilliant hair and makeup of Eugene Souleiman and Isamaya Ffrench.
At a moment when many apex brands in the luxury fashion world are playing cover versions of the same old standards—even as it becomes clear that audience appetite has fundamentally altered—Watanabe’s thrillingly punkish creative destruction of those classics pointed to a way ahead.