La Parisienne

The Fashion Spot (Morphe)

The Fashion Spot (Morphe)

The Fashion Spot (Morphe)

The Fashion Spot (Morphe)

The Fashion Spot (Morphe)

March 2, 2013 PARIS By Jo-Ann Furniss Junya Watanabe seems to be in love with the idea of the ready-made—a piece of clothing that a whole collection can sometimes spin around in its many permutations. In recent years, season after season, he has presented something archetypal and iconic and, somehow, reinvigorated the view of it. During this process he has never bored the viewer or the wearer with the pieces' multitudinous forms; it's something of an achievement. Perhaps the greatest example of this was Watanabe's black leather jacket collection of Fall 2011, which also dealt with, in a hefty aside, the codified garments of punk. Quite a few people attempting to do punk collections this season should really read that one and weep. In fact, it appears that many have: Watanabe is one of the designers that has been most heavily borrowed from recently. So today, at his own show, where Watanabe seemingly presented his own past collections as the ready-mades and decided to liberally lift from himself, there was a kind of cheeky meta-fashion. It was like a recent-hits compilation (and Watanabe's hits have a hefty dose of sampling) with a variety of remixes. Nevertheless, what he offered felt fresh, fun, and audacious today. He even accompanied the looks with high heels for the first time. They added to a sense of rebellion, maybe even a rebellion against the preconceived notions of Junya Watanabe. The black leather jacket collection had a starring role, coming to the fore and peppering much of the proceedings. The Perfecto-style jacket, the symbol of rebellion, seemed to become fused with the bric-a-brac of leftover fashion in the first looks. These were the kind of fabrics found hanging around in secondhand shops. The models' bird's-nest wigs also gave that feeling of the detritus of fashion. There were hints of the reconfigured denim from Watanabe's Spring 2009 Africa collection, as well as his punk patchwork jeans from Fall 2011, here given a much bigger starring role. An additional spin on the trench also appeared again, this time seemingly cross-fertilized with the Perfecto, producing a profusion of zips. It all added up to a feeling of playfulness, and yet a strange profundity about the passing disposability of fashions. If Rei Kawakubo is the queen of Paris fashion in terms of consistent innovation, then logic dictates that Junya Watanabe is the crown prince. Yet does a wider public quite realize this? Watanabe is one of the great contemporary designers; he's hardly an unknown, but he deserves a much broader audience. Hopefully, with this collection he will get it. Source: style.com

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

The Fashion Spot (Marc10)

March 1, 2013 PARIS By Jo-Ann Furniss The unprepossessing bunker that is the show venue at Bercy was the site of the Yohji Yamamoto runway presentation this evening. Yet this back-to-basics place, with its simple lines of wooden chairs arranged in a square, turned out to be the launch pad for a fashion show that was really something special. Yamamoto honed in on what it really means to produce fashion today, away from pyrotechnics and with a focus on the real spectacle of exceptional clothes. The spirit of rebellion and doing-what-the-hell-I-want that seems to be possessing Alber Elbaz at the moment also seems to be grabbing Yohji Yamamoto. There were so many foundations for so many collections in this show that it was quite bewildering. In lesser hands, this might have appeared like somebody who did not know what the hell they were doing, with few hits and a lot of misses. In Yamamoto's case the exact opposite was true: it appeared he knew exactly, precisely what he was doing. This collection was a bravura display from somebody who has and has had so many ideas that he is one of the definitive figures in shaping the way contemporary fashion is perceived. Sometimes it is easy to forget that with Yamamoto; he's like a favorite song you don't play for a long time and then hear again, thinking "How good is that?" In turn, this collection was like a Yohji compilation album: reworked, remastered, lost tracks, new material, the lot. The beginning might have had a debt to the eighties Yohji, in its stripped-down black looks that were actually far from simple—complex, technical cutting prevailed in this workwear-inflected section, as it did throughout. But this moved on quickly to double-breasted tailoring with kimono sleeves, then to mathematically precise origami square-pleated looks, then frayed picture hats and tailcoats paired with cream trousers that brought to mind the crispness of cricket whites… the descriptions of cutting, pleating, tailoring, draping, knitting, and the multiplicity of silhouettes could continue. There was also a shock of various colors between the beloved blacks. But the point of these clothes is that they have to be seen and experienced: Consuming a catwalk image or reading about them is just not going to cut it. As Yamamoto said backstage after his show: "I am a dressmaker; I am not a fashion designer. From 10 to 15 years ago the fashion market became shit." Yes, that was "shit." He made a point of clarifying that before continuing. "My role is to get the value of clothing back for everyone: cutting, draping, tailoring. There was no real theme to the collection, I just wanted to make dresses, to tailor and enjoy the value of clothing." Source: style.com

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)

The Fashion Spot (Psylocke)