Very refined bondage plus a vegan breakfast buffet made for a healthy start at this morning’s Undercover womenswear presentation. It was held at Dover Street Market Paris: we filed through the courtyard, past the chair avalanche installation by Tadashi Kawamata, and headed downstairs. Once there we were greeted with a group of recognizably quotidian garments arranged on mannequins. There was a white hoodie worn with black leather leggings. A red knit polo shirt with matching five-pocket pants. A white T-shirt dress. A khaki cardigan. A white tailored blazer with a matching skirt. A biker jacket (naturally). And a long black tailored coat dress.
You noticed that the lifeless figures were wearing the same lace collars and metal leaf or nail headpieces last seen at June’s menswear show. Some wore new accessories: gauze chokers embroidered with the words “KOSMIK WITCH.” Yet the most striking details lay within those aforementioned garments; banks of parallel golden zippers set in leather strips and linked by more leather lacing, or sections of metal-buckled strapping that contained and defined.
Jun Takahashi was on hand, via translator, to outline. The translator summated: “The core of Undercover design is usually putting some of his unique taste into daily clothes… adding some fetish-ness, and being able to adjust the size and the silhouette can make daily clothes more sexy and also more elegant.” Punk is one of Takahashi’s foundational influences, and the worn mechanisms of restraint and control are key to that subculture’s fashion tradition. Here he was applying them to some strikingly mainstream templates, in order to make the safe suddenly exhilaratingly dangerous.
In the next room was that breakfast buffet, which was receiving a thorough review from early arrivals. Alongside it was a section of non-bondage outfits that used needle-punching to blur the gradient sections of washed color in the looks. These were more womenswear cousins to the menswear that had shown in June, in that they were based around artist Robert Bosisio’s nebulous dimensional canvases. Finally we came to a room in which were arranged four dresses, in pink, white, black, and a lemon print on black. These all had fin-like frilled necklines and hems, between which ran silhouette-defining sections of more strapping or zippers and lacing. They were worn by lace-masked and metal garlanded models, who twirled effortlessly on rotating platforms: pretty-severe.
The now-revived Undercover policy is to have one show a season, and throw a presentation for whichever gender’s collection doesn’t make the runway that time round. Today’s format, especially with the designer present, was as stimulating to sample as the no-egg egg sandwich in the buffet. It was infinitely more interesting and engaging than having only the lookbook to hand. And it allowed for a final question: what is Takahashi’s daily fetish? The designer smiled under his hat, then delivered the answer to this one himself: “a secret!”