A taste for the abstruse and, by extension, clothes no one will wear outside of a chic fashion show is the vice shared by all liberal democracies, so the growing reputation of Japanese designer and student of the postwar apparel school Junya Watanabe for widening the rift between art and life can at least be appreciated in terms of solidarity. Or is that commiseration? Watanabe chose this week's Paris festival of pomp to unveil his latest creation that would, said observers, "bring back punk."
Punk would protest at being doubly misunderstood. Once is preferred, as any upstanding anarchist prides himself on bewildering the establishment with his rebellion; twice is intolerable, for it means the establishment has gotten on fine without him, warmed to the litany of empty calls for revolution and has decided to integrate him in spite of it all. The malcontent is no longer condemned: he is an amusing caricature, perfect for exclusive markets. Anything he yells now only adds to expectation, the quaint little vandal.
So Watanabe tailored a set of outfits, taking postmodern loutishness from memory. Feet? Heavy and ponderous black boots. Bottom? Something torn, something black, something white, something red; most of it appropriated. Top? See "bottom." Head? Spiked half-helmets; plastic wrap over the face. The wrap? — oh, that would be Watanabe's own jab at common sense, his nod to the convention of defiance. The eccentric headgear, the overgrown scalp locks, are what seem to have brought the most eyebrows into puzzled misalignment. And? Perhaps they dramatize the first glorious microseconds that follow drilling a hole in the head of the Grecian Discus Thrower, inserting a stick of dynamite, lighting the fuse and stepping back to arm the high-speed camera. Or they could be a 21st-Century answer to the Statue of Liberty — a crown of spires without the Harbor girl's fuddy-duddy uniplanarity. One critic imputed Watanabe's "deconstruction" to politics, though irony would be the better choice, street urchin incorrigibility now swishing up and down a catwalk at a private Paris party.