Junya Watanabe is interested in geometries for Spring/Summer 2015, in tessellation and best fit – and their opposites. Models wore Metropolis-esque halo-helmets of PVC and his usual trapeze line tunics and shifts, leather shorts and wrapped skirts.
But these were made from giant circles, cut out and used as planes that had been assembled into a larger shape – from leather, PVC, cotton, glittered fabrics and neoprene, they bubbled into being as wearable collages. Later there were squares too, with wrinkled corners as if they had been unfolded, so that they crinkled and winked as models took each step. And triangles too, ranged in isoscelene rows across tabards, made up Watanabe’s building blocks vision.
This playful collection felt like fashion Duplo in the way the designer relied on shapes to construct and interact – it was far more complex than that, of course, but there was something of the joy and satisfied delight of a toddler learning visuals here.
Colours were bright too, in a de Stijl school of primaries – egg yolk yellow, tomato red and cobalt blue to create a cartoonish feel. More structured pieces were flat cut and bonded at the seams so they took on the aspect of cut-outs folded out onto paper-dolls.
Then there was the sheer level of detail – the various textures of the cut-outs, but also the tooling on leather, the inlays of different colours within the panels themselves and the build up to a finale dress that was a piece of Constructivist art in itself. So while the foundations stones of this collection were nice and simple, it was really anything but – Watanabe riffed on life’s fundamentals, in fact, and the geometries by which we live, and he made it all seem like a doddle.
