Junya Watanabe RTW Spring 2024

In a European season strong on denim, Junya Watanabe’s designs win the seaming, volume and imagination sweepstakes.

Here was a resolutely radical collection as prickly as a cactus, built on jutting geometric shapes — pyramids, arcs, cylinders and planks. It’s as if the models were magnets and metal building blocks had randomly coagulated around them.

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Watanabe said the collection theme was “creating objects, not clothes” and you could imagine whomever is behind the Instagram account Rick Dick scouring the internet for photos of Moravian stars to juxtapose with these pointy garments.

There were familiar Watanabe archetypes — his beloved leather biker jackets, bombers and abstract takes on Rue Cambon — plus a triangular take on jodhpurs that seemed fit for the metaverse.

Zippers, metallic snaps, tweed fabrics and gold buttons signaled those archetypes, but silhouettes were abstracted via exploded sleeves, excess fabric flaps, portholes of various shapes, and dangling rods of fabric, straight or arched. The designs also came in black and red felt.

Suffice to say, these spiky garments, or objects, are for collectors, and certainly not commuters. You could take someone’s eye out.

But in a season of safe, commercial collections, it was exhilarating to watch Watanabe stick his neck out with wondrous new forms for which a fashion vocabulary has yet to be invented.

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Launch Gallery: Junya Watanabe RTW Spring 2024

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