Her cheeks framed with finger waves and streaked by mascara rivulets, Maggie Maurer paused, then pivoted. She spun around on the checkered floor in her flared long skirt and a hulking garment built from gloves and protective gear, then threw down her arms in a dramatic adorno. The lights cut and the applause began.
Junya Watanabe presented a masterful show this morning on the dance floor of an imagined tango club. To the sound of “Libertango” by Astor Piazzolla, the models articulated dramatic mood swings—throwing coats to the floor, casting sideway glances at the phone-holding audience, fleeing as if pursued, mooching as if rejected. The trademark movement direction of Pat Boguslawski, hair design by Eugene Souleiman, and tear-touched makeup by Isamaya Ffrench complemented the highly designed chaos of a collection in which couture-silhouette gowns were made from items including emergency blankets, motorcyclist protective gear, and a wood sign that asked in Spanish: “May peace prevail in the world.”
Watanabe’s collection was titled The Art of Assemblage Couture and seemed to propose a version of fashion’s highest form that suggested a real—or at least less unreal—version of the world. Many of the dresses reflected Watanabe’s long-standing moto-mania: Gloves, jackets, protective gear, calipers, helmets, and much other moto ephemera were incorporated into many of the looks. Others were assembled from patches of Lurex and knit or faux fur; a menagerie of stuffed toy animals; and, in one case, an almost arbitrary jumble of items including that sign, a mirror printed with Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, wood-set squares, handkerchiefs, and rosettes. Jersey, knit, pleated fabric, mesh, and other material membranes were sometimes used to hold things together.
As an exercise in collision, it could have been a car crash. But Watanabe’s compositional expertise and imagination enabled him to build garments that navigated themselves coherently from the models’ bodies onto the watchers’ synapses as bona fide clothes. The most built pieces, especially when moto sourced, had a futuristic super-suit aura in their hulking shoulders, cyborg peplums, and articulated arms. Watanabe’s incorporation of gloves into these garments was an example of high handicraft and also symbolism: Many of their fingers were linked, or at least brushing, like the hands of two partners on a dance floor.