Junya Watanabe

This morning we got punk’d! With 80s Japanese punk blaring from the speakers, Junya Watanabe took the trend—and theme of the Met show in May—and made it his own. Hair was piled up on top, backcombed beyond recognition, and shredded like a Marie Antoinette hybrid out of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. And all the models wore puzzling round-toe court shoes that remind us of every girl we ever met in a club.

Watanabe knows how to reinvent a staple, and he made us covet the biker jacket we have grown inseparable from. They came patch-worked in his signature tartans and bouclés, extended and turned into trench coats, mutated into bubble-hemmed prom dresses, fused with classic varsity jackets, twisted into asymmetric tops—the permutations were endless and perfect. Zips were applied liberally to the trenches; they accentuated the hips as they opened up when the models walked. Blue jeans were sliced and cut up to create new versions of another wardrobe staple, their hems rolled to reveal tiny floral motifs.

The show was more translatable than recent seasons, and many an editor furiously tweeted in admiration of their fondness for these genius new versions of their beloved classics. Also tweetable, the first signs of the highly anticipated Loewe collaboration, in the form of bags hanging from the models’ arms.

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