The sentiments sounded tailor-made for the smartphone-obsessed fashion flock.
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The sentiments sounded tailor-made for the smartphone-obsessed fashion flock.
Jun Takahashi's Undercover show began with a manifesto, borrowed (a little postshow Googling revealed) from the all-girl post-punk band Savages. "The world used to be silent/Now it has too many voices/And the noises are constant distraction/They multiply, intensify." The sentiments sounded tailor-made for the smartphone-obsessed fashion flock.
But then Takahashi went and served up some made-for-social-media moments of his own, with palindromes and anagrams decorating his part-sport, part-S&M-inflected streetwear. (As an aside, it doesn't seem a coincidence that the revival of logomania corresponds with the explosion of Instacrack.) "Snug" turned to reveal "guns"; "silent" became "listen"; and "dog," of course, was "god." Wordplay along these lines is already a big trend—witness the "Selfie" T-shirts printed in Céline's font, or "Homies" in the Hermès logo. Takahashi's clothes capitalize on that phenomenon at the same time that they elevate it and, perhaps just a little bit, politicize it. You can't buy a T-shirt with LED lights on its front and back or a clutch-cum-wristlet flashing words like a miniature billboard from a vendor on the street. We are all just walking billboards. That's the kind of thing that could keep a thinker like Takahashi up at night.
"The contradiction in the world and the contradiction in myself" was his starting point, he explained backstage. Takahashi doesn't seem eager to render judgment; quite the opposite—there was nothing sneering about the collection. But he did send people out the door with some deep thoughts to accompany their shopping lists, and that's a rare enough occurrence that it deserves applause.