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For AW12 Junya Watanabe created a super race; better dressed, better music taste and with superhuman Pop painted hair. By now androgyny is well covered ground, but Watanabe found a way to make it new. The super race was neither man nor woman, wearing suit jackets and trousers that morphed into dresses and skirts. A white shirt and neat blue suit had a female contour but a male aesthetic. The eye-popping hair was a constant gender blocker and boots and brogues with sheer black socks swung both ways. A pinstripe suit jacket in cobalt blue over a black maxi skirt and stitched up sleeves were amongst i-D’s favourite looks. The soundtrack was the most interesting of the week, except perhaps for his mentor Rei Kawakubo, surely no coincidence, with her silent soundtrack. Watanabe’s show started with the upbeat ‘Good Day Today’ by David Lynch, and finished with the filmmaker turned musician’s really bizarre ‘Strange and Unproductive Thinking’, which includes the lyrics… “teeth, while not necessarily considered one of the primary building blocks of happiness, can in fact become a small sore, festering and transferring negative energies to the once quiet and peaceful mind, giving it over to strange and unproductive thinking.” Though we couldn’t relate the idea of tooth decay to the clothes, the association with Lynch was a good one. Like Lynch’s films, Watanabe’s collection was dark, weird, witty and brilliant all at once. He showed us how to do it better than we do it now. This was trend-setting in its purest form.
Text: Sarah Raphael
Photography: Mitchell Sams
Click here to see our AW12 Womenswear coverage in full.
