Somewhere, for some reason, someone has come to the mystifying conclusion that they require a Gore-Tex jacket. This occurs for endless reasons that eschew logic, financial security, and modesty. Gore-Tex jackets are of a similarly exhaustive variety. Some thriftily seek tech-nerd brandlessness, the high rollers put down for their patinaed Visvims or bold Arcteryx shells, and the hypebeasts squabble over multicolored Supreme and Palace. The world of Gore-tex archive jackets quickly gets costly. Collaborations with North Face and Beams or Supreme cost at least a thousand dollars, as do Palace and Engineered Garments’ more muted work. Infamous somehow for both branded and understated Gore-Tex models is Junya Watanabe with his endless brand collabs, EyE menswear in brilliant primary colors, and experiments in fabric blends.
In his last menswear show, Watanabe revealed a Gore-Tex jacket of unavoidable hype and either rugged or appalling simplicity. The piece fit nicely among a sea of monochrome, there was a new multi-pocketed Carhartt jacket replete with bulging technical pockets, Champion hoodies with puffer sleeves, bold Levi’s with scrambled and enlarged pocket placements, and finally, a Gore-Tex jacket with Palace. Eyebrows rose at this brand appearing in the cast of Watanabe’s 18 collaborators, a clear deviation in strategy from his usual suspects. Paired with similarly simple collaborative Oakley slip-ons - recently making a comeback through a collaboration with Brain Dead and Y2K fervor - a pattern emerges for Watanabe. He is interested in a new kind of Gore-Tex buyer, a new kind of customer.
FW23 was an articulated call to the Palace guzzling, Brain Dead desiring, Carhartt-ed hypebeasts and freaks: Junya Watanabe is someone to notice. It wasn’t as if work with Supreme, a Broad gift shop smorgasbord of pop art plastering in SS23, and dropping iterations of hyped New Balance models alongside the regular normcore fare wasn’t designed to target the hypebeasts, but few are so bold in their resolve to work with Supreme and Palace within three years.
It’s a time-tested model - you can’t have Comme Des Garcons Homme Plus without CDG Play financing their experiments. Still, for someone so adamant about not keeping up with fashion or other designers, it’s fascinating to see Watanabe ride the wave of hype with such ease. FW23 is an effective integration of his stranger, avant, and subcultural experiments with objects designed to appease the young and the streetwear obsessed. In its monochrome simplicity and technical flare, Watanabe seems to announce the ubiquitous appeal and possibility of a heavy jacket, a weird pair of pants, and a bag - whether one is a hipster, denim freak, rapper, hypebeast, or gorp-fanatic. The power of the Palace/Watanabe jacket is that it stands out as an improbable and inevitably desired object as much as it blends in. Watanabe has turned the balance of art and commerce into a fascinating craft.
Watanabe’s SS24 show was not so much a pivot, but a more precise articulation of these continued goals. Watanabe employs another stacked cast of 18 brands, yet his main collaborator is himself, rather, his womenswear. These were always the more deconstructionist, sexy, and regarded of his garment experiments, and here Watanabe reinterprets them in more muted menswear settings. There’s a 2006 reference in the hairstyles and patchworks (a palette cleanser from 2021’s Supreme attempt at the same collection) as well as more modern references as recent as FW22. Supplementing these recontextualized patchwork shells are more conservative investments. CAT boots, 3M Carhartt firefighter coats, and more Palace.
For SS24, logos are enlarged and collaborations complicated in tandem with the exaggeration of Watanabe’s silhouettes for the unbranded. SS24 takes the tightrope Watanabe walked last season in balancing the commercial with an avant-normcore and raises the stakes to powerful and successful extremities. This gamble does not come without consequences, Watanabe shows fewer looks with more complex construction meaning, as-per the CDG Homme/Play dichotomy, logos must be as enticing as these avant experiments.
Far from a rebrand for Watanabe, this collection is a fascinating organization of what sells, how to sell, and what to juxtapose. The result is a symphony of experiments, each desirable for differing and sometimes clashing reasons. Here, Watanabe marries his studies of ubiquity and deconstruction.
An essential aspect of this show’s commercial aspirations and aesthetic swing is its relation to its womenswear - its most experimental side. There is a politics to the differentiation of male and female garments that Watanabe, perhaps unintentionally, engages with through the melding of his womenswear codes.
Martine Rose, a newer menswear deconstructionist has spoken openly about the need for gender differentiation in garments as well as supposed “gender-free“ design. Rose’s personal dislike for gender free design stems from what she terms a “sexless“ or “neutered“ quality. Her perspective is that the challenging of gender normative dress comes from more explicit crossing and muddling of femininity and masculinity, and to design a tee shirt, a corset, or a pair of leather chaps without specific bodies in mind leads to clothing that is less sexy and therefore less interesting. While this statement serves as a reflection of the kinds of garments she creates, her more recent collections are sized as “gender free“. While Rose’s clothes root themselves in binary traditions as menswear, her designs explicitly invert and deconstruct menswear forms while creating sizing for almost everyone (unless you have size 13 feet).
Many other menswear titans like Aries, and Nike recognize that broader sizing options for gendered pieces that are diverse enough to accommodate a wider range of sizes and bodies make for a broader enjoyment and understanding of the garment. For Aries or Rose, broader sizing takes their brand outside of niches and provides them more opportunities to grow. For Nike, broadening sizing for menswear releases allows more women to participate in sneaker culture, yet inversely new women-only releases draw hype and demand for the few large sizes made for men (an inversion of what women in sneaker culture have to deal with).
In Watanabe’s case, instead of someone finding a Martine Rose blouse in a large enough size, some maniac can buy a three thousand dollar leather patchwork tunic and actually be able to fit in it. Sex and inversion seem less of a focus for Watanabe compared to Rose - his use of women’s garments is more akin to translation. A dress becomes a bulbous coat and a tweed cardigan becomes a punkish vest. While Watanabe’s codes for men and women are not totally conservative, he has left a generous gulf in melding these codes.
Watanabe’s strategy instead is straight out of the Kawakubo playbook: mixing references between sub-labels with enough distinction in price, audience, and accessibility to make the experimental pieces people obsess over available, while always keeping the option for the original at arm’s reach. Don’t want to shell out for CDG Homme armor pieces from FW16? Try BLACK Comme Des Garcons’ buckle shirt or the CDG Shirt buckle pants. Rather than supply a FW22 patchwork dress in more varied sizes, Watanabe creates a less exaggerated version “for men“ that references the original and retains its exclusivity-determined price.
As a collection centering organizational optimization and the artful balance of experiment and profit, the eye of Watanabe’s SS24 storm is sublime. It straddles Watanabe’s conservative binary as a place where all things terrifyingly strange meet everything kind and simple. It is the Junya Watanabe Stussy hoodie.
For Kuwakubo and the Stussy big wigs in the boardroom, it’s blissful synergy. Tik Tok will love it, the kids will love it, and it will sell on every continent in every Dover Street chapter and every Stussy flagship, and sell out too. Unlike last season’s Oakley gamble, steeped in gorp nostalgia, Brain Dead fandom, and trust in Watanabe’s quiet perfection, here is a brand too ingrained as a streetwear stalwart to fail. This is not the quiet and purportedly sublime 2022 Carhartt x EyE hoodie devoid of graphic or sane price point. It is the piece that pushes hypebeasts to flex their respectability and their gangly arms and pushes the Junya fan to accept Stussy as art. It’s a statement that refuses to be buried next to gigantic cargos or physical beauty, its eyelets sparkle and its branding slices through any attempt at all-black modesty.
Here is Watanabe’s everyman uniform: the simple large layer and weird pair of pants he proposed in FW23. It’s hypebeasty, it's gorpy, it’s young, and it’s sexy. It is the crystallization of art and commerce into a product that may be able to challenge both.
Ultimately, it’s fascinating to see Watanabe chase and ultimately form this new customer. If he is forced to pander, Watanabe will change those he must seduce, and once he knows the new breadth of his audience he will challenge and expand their world. If anything, this new strategy is an invitation to engage in new dichotomies and conversations, with modern menswear titans like Martine Rose and Stussy.
This coming fall, the first of Watanabe’s experiments in this dichotomy will release. Who will buy FW23? What will sit on Dover Street sales for years? Where is Watanabe’s ceiling for his brand’s growth, and what still is he yet to challenge?