Printing Vintage: Junya Watanabe’s Art of Replica

The essay I wrote that inspired my substack

This past spring I was tricked inside a high-end clothing store. When I entered the section dedicated to Comme Des Garcons protege Junya Watanabe, I discovered denim jeans covered in constellations of creases, ripples, and patched tears. These were the sort of jeans with discernible histories between their folds, and in their landscapes of artful repairs and wear was an invitation to touch. I do, and the denim is soft and sleek to the touch. I leave. I am drawn back. I ask someone about the pants, and they happily tell me they are 100% nylon, even showing me the thick lining of both to prove it (Note the double rivets). He details that both pieces have been sourced from Japanese vintage purveyor Berberjin, where 1920s denim pieces were digitally scanned and printed onto the nylon pieces. I touch them again, feeling the smooth falseness of what appear to be loose threads, the intangibility of printed pleats, and the now unrealistic thickness of its padding. What I assumed was an artful denim recreation was actually a wearable, tangible nylon photograph. It is a replica.

In this instance, a replica does more than allow one to physicalize, or in this case, wear the archive. Watanabe’s piece denies exact replica, instead relying on the verisimilitude of photography as a means of recreating a remnant of the archive that acts like a photograph; providing the veneer of reality with an understanding of falsity. Watanabe’s nylon “denim” piece serves as a more tactile application of the power of both replica and photography and their ability to bring tactility into the archive.

Elizabeth Edwards writes on different physicalizations of photographs and the ways in which meaning, context, viewer, and photographer are repositioned accordingly. She writes, “material processes shape the signifying possibilities of the photograph and allow the image to be “transposed from one realm of significance to another”“ Our goal is therefore to analyze Watanabe’s piece as a photograph designed to be worn and as an addition to the practice of replicating archival items. Archival replica denotes importance, what is worth replicating, and usually brings with it a capitalist impulse surrounding marketability. Replica also makes the archive tangible and makes valuable objects in the archive both accessible and more fully understood. A museum that holds a famous work of art will display it via tangible postcard or print, a furniture store may evoke a famous design for cheap, or an art book may collect difficult-to-find objects in glossy, organized images. In each of these scenarios, the general public pays for a piece or pieces that have been cultivated from the already curated archive.

It is important to note the specificity of Watanabe’s replica being on a continuum of the Japanese denim market and its history of denim replica. The Japanese denim industry exists today in great part due to the high demand for original Americana, of which only so much exists. After Levi’s began utilizing cheaper manufacturing technology amidst a Japanese boom of the Levi’s 501, buyers began complaining about decreases in quality and color. This led to years of international buyers finding and evacuating rare, vintage denim from the U.S, often leading to high prices. David W Marx describes this phenomenon by writing that “Nothing was more real, more American —and more expensive— than an actual pair of 1950s Levi’s 501XX” This was not simply a phenomenon surrounding a brand, and high values were placed on the nature of denim aging/repair, types of creases in the denim, and tag details. As prices for these items continued to skyrocket with rarity and scarcity, Japanese designers began attempting to mimic the quality and tactility of this denim through reclamation and, as is important here, recreation. Some recreations employed Japanese weaving techniques such as boro and Japanese Buddhist concepts such as wabi-sabi (finding beauty in imperfection) leading to projects such as Kapital , which subverted Levi’s design tropes while referencing core branding elements. Other groups actively mimicked American designs and advertising such as Edwin, Big John Jeans, and Evisu, which attempted to use the original denim sources and manufacturing mills as Levi’s. Denim replica in Japan is a story of replicating iconic designs, but also one of reinterpretation, reappropriation, and a deep sense of irony.

One designer who employs replica in a far more literal sense than Watanabe is Tomoaki Nagao, better known as Nigo. Nigo, himself a denim collector, is the founder of legendary streetwear brand A Bathing Ape, a brand that itself made famous denim styles that actively mimicked those of early Lee jeans. Nigo worked independently with Levi’s in 2021, taking the model of a pair of 1915 buckle-back 501 Levis jeans he bought in 1986, recreating the model denim using age-appropriate manufacturing techniques, and aging newly made pairs 35 years. Thus, the pair retain a seemingly authentic degree of detail, decay, and texture to the original. To the denim aficionado, 35 years after Nigo purchased his slice of the archive, the highly coveted and rare archive item becomes accessible, tangible, and almost indistinguishable from the “real”.

In this sense, Nigo attempts and approaches perfect replica, something that Watanabe explicitly rejects. From a visual standpoint, could the average viewer really tell between the two pairs which is not made of denim? While I myself am definitely an untrained eye, it took being told the actual materials Watanabe used to shatter my illusion of perfect replica. Watanabe’s goal isn’t simply to craft something purposefully imperfect, it is to question if perfect replica is achievable. In this spirit, Watanabe’s replica forces the viewer to question the nature of verisimilitude, “real” reproduction, and to reckon with the nature of reproduction. Watanabe’s “trick” in making a distant or inexperienced eye imagine his replica can be as accurate as Nigo’s illustrates that to a degree, accuracy or realness in reproduction is unimportant to the associative power of the gaze. If one reproduction captures the total tactile and visual experience of the source and another only captures the visual, who but an expert can tell which is more real? This goes to show that to an extent, the visual and photographic are powerful enough to substitute for accurate tactility. Nigo’s replica is insistent on the complete accuracy of a product and the specific way it has aged, felt and been seen. Watanabe’s replica insists that somehow a photographic replica can be just as effective and powerful as something like Nigo’s through the power of image alone.

Photography is, after all, itself a form of replica, held up for a degree of verisimilitude that simultaneously disproves itself as completely accurate representation through its physicality. It does not matter if a photograph is knowingly separate as a physical object from the image it depicts, if it depicts the image it is the image. Barthes writes that “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see”. We can compare this idea of Barthes’ to Edwards’ insistence that the nature of a photograph’s physical form completely shifts its meaning. When confronted with the photograph in more physical, tactile ways, the viewer gains a double vision of the perceived image and its physical photographic form. Therefore, photography becomes the perfect medium for subverting denim replica; a perfect visual depiction of its subject and an everlasting reminder through the smoothed over details that would otherwise mark it as real, that it is not. The archive denim world is obsessed with these details, from tag marks to patterns of aging. Watanabe successfully uses photography in its “invisible“ form through the attention to these details, yet makes it clear to anyone performing close examination that the replica is technically, though artfully, incorrect. Through photography Watanabe walks a fine line, tricking the untrained eyes who would see the pants as denim and bringing the expert eye into conflict between the exactness of Watanabe’s recreation and its inherent falsity. Through photography, the pants gesture at the inherent impossibility of verisimilitudinous archive recreation. Even if he did as Nigo did, he would be as unsuccessful at recreating the past as an expert photographer.

Walter Benjamin writes of a more intangible question of photographic reproduction through the question of aura and authenticity. In his eyes, the aura of an image that gives it its power derives from an understanding of it as authentic. Benjamin expands on this by writing “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter.” This is an idea that deeply challenges Nigo’s concept of a perfect reproduction. What will be lost in the recreation? Will the aura of the recreation retain that of the original pair? Moreover, what is lost in turning one piece of early denim history and recreating exactly only one type of aging? Benjamin’s concept of how reproduction works seem to make Nigo’s project seem more futile - another reminder that some intangible quality, aura or otherwise, will be missing. Benjamin argues that in photography authenticity takes on a different form, writing that “process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens” Watanabe’s project becomes, by Benjamin’s standards, an attempt to reexamine the aura of the object by drastically and purposefully reframing authenticity via photography. The viewer who sees Watanabe’s replica as a photograph is able to notice minute printed details they otherwise would have missed or taken for granted. While in this understanding there is a dilution of the original object, the acknowledgment of inaccessibility that Nigo defies retains a degree of the original’s authenticity. Watanabe’s replica is one that knowingly suggests the original and authentic is always inaccessible.

It would be incorrect to assume Watanabe’s distancing of the past through photography is purely cynical. In this instance, the sourcing of the original image of the denim and its context only complicates the process of looking. The original 1920s denim used was sourced by the Japanese vintage store Berberjin. Yōsuke Ōtsubo, a denim buyer active in the days of Nigo and Watanabe is quoted by Marx as saying “the basement of Harajuku store Berberjin is definitely the most important place for vintage jeans in the entire world”6. Watanabe is speaking on the same period of the vintage denim boom as Nigo, but focussing wholly on the viewing process. Looking at Watanabe’s replica becomes more than a cynical question of accurate recreation, it becomes an image that functions as a tactile memory of a piece of denim that usually would exist behind glass or tucked away in the store. The denim Watanabe prints is inaccessible as a photograph, but also in the sense that it presents a rare and inaccessible denim piece that can only truly be looked at. Looking at these pants, therefore, retains even more of the authentic experience of going to berberjin and seeing denim you cannot have. The context of berberjin centers Watanabe’s replica even more specifically in time and space. The lack of tactility in this environment defines Watanabe’s homage. The denim being referenced was perhaps never designed to be felt or examined, providing, through an absence of tactility, a more accurate recreation that was never accessible to begin with.

The question of tactility is a topic more complicated than the context of Watanabe’s source denim, it is essential to both replicas' relation to the past. Nigo’s replica may offer a feeling of age, the looseness of thread, and the patterns of a crease, although the wearer will still intrinsically know it has been created mechanically. In this instance truth will transcend physicality and Nigo’s pair will seem like a photograph ripped in half, unveiled. The extra layer in Watanabe’s pair is that despite the tactility of witnessing the pants drape and fit like denim, the experience of wearing the pants is unconcealed. They are 100% nylon, thick enough to resemble denim but when worn, unmistakably separated from the original. While certainly soft and high quality, the experience of wearing nylon is simply incongruous with wearing denim. This is perhaps the equivalent of displaying a photograph in a glass case with its back visible, the photograph heralded not simply as image but as object bearing image. Watanabe’s photographic replica does not seek to go beyond the experiential powers of the medium. Instead, he uses the acknowledged physical limitation of tactility and photography to point them out.

One aspect of this comparison and the entire archive denim and denim replica industry that has been avoided is money. Watanabe’s pair is sold for anywhere between $423 and $793 USD, whereas Nigo’s were limited to 100 pieces and sold for $650 USD. While the hypothetical consumer is paying for a complex commentary on denim replica alongside craftsmanship and exceptional materials, this inflation is just as much the result of Nigo and Watanabe’s fame and cult following. On one hand, this is an exorbitant price to pay considering the nominal price of secondhand denim or even for new Levi’s. On the other hand, the replica prices may still be only a fraction of what their original vintage Levi’s models cost, meaning for some, the price serves as an opportunity to own the inaccessible. This may seem an adequate trade for Nigo’s pair, but Watanabe’s cause a wholly different conversation. In this case, the buyer pays for a reproduction that tells the wearer and viewer it is false, and that it will never achieve the verisimilitude or feeling of the original, nor will the sensation of owning or having Watanabe’s pair compare to that of owning the authentic. Does the buyer then pay for the cleverness of this obfuscation? For the reference alone? Clearly, capitalism and the modern age muddy the pure aesthetic questions of Watanabe’s experiment.

There is a way in which this question of capitalism intersects with Watanabe’s photographic experiment. Now, someone can go to a shop as I did and gaze at Watanabe’s valuable replica and, as it seems, the original berberjin piece simultaneously. In this modern retail scenario, a doubling occurs, both in viewing and inaccessibility. Encountering Watanabe’s work in this way might even be seen as placing the object in its truest spatial context, potentially revealing the authentic object’s aura in a way that would seem impossible elsewhere. Certainly, when viewed online this doubling turns to tripling - a photograph of a photograph on a screen in the field of a sparse online shop page. In this light Watanabe’s work is indistinguishable from any other piece of denim; a lack of tactility only further alienates the subject from what makes it unique. Certainly in this online space without tactility, the time and place of the replica’s context and thus its aura dissipates. What good is the cleverness of its replica or the beauty of its point on the past if it can be seen as indistinguishable from Nigo’s replica experiment? What we learn from this capitalist contextualizing of Watanabe’s work is that the photographic nature of its replica has the opportunity to either deeply heighten or completely destroy the power of the “denim”.

While there are simple and sophisticated ways of remembering, there is no correct way to do so. Denim replica is more than a trend, it is an opportunity for the wearer and viewer to experience the past firsthand. It is an opportunity to interact with the archive, in some senses, to cause its literal wear and tear. The specific medium of photography in denim replica serves as a complication to modes of viewership, verisimilitude, and replica itself. Watanabe is therefore successful at questioning the barrier of photography, the nature of the archive and its desire to replicate itself, and a larger question of refashioning memory.