THE CONTROLLED ANARCHY OF JUN TAKAHASHI

“Jun is the only designer from the Ura-Hara scene who knows that true creation comes from and with pain,” Takeji Hirakawa

1.

TOKYO – The offices of Undercover, the cult Japanese fashion brand, are located in the maze of the Upper Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Undercover occupies the entire building, whose front is a repurposed shipping container that floats above ground, a window cut into its front end. On a recent visit in March, just after the end of Tokyo Fashion Week, I found the brand’s operations spilling out in front of the office, where boxes bearing the Undercover logo lay on the ground, its signature motorcycle jackets that retail for thousands of dollars spilling out of them. A middle-aged man with long silver hair wearing a coach’s jacket that said “Undercover Records” on the back milled around the boxes.

The building’s basement contains a large room with double-height ceiling and white painted walls that serves as the Undercover showroom. On one wall there hung a large painting by Markus Akesson, the Swedish artist whose images Jun Takahashi, Undercover’s designer, used in his Fall / Winter 2021 men’s collection. Akesson’s paintings, slightly surreal and unsettling, like much of Takahashi’s own work, were printed on fishtail parkas, padded coats, and wool sweaters.

On the opposite wall there was a neon sign with the encircled “A” made from tree branches, a symbol for anarchy. In front of it stood a dress form with a dress from Undercover’s Spring / Summer 2024 women’s collection that Takahashi showed in Paris last September. Its skirt was a lit up plastic bubble that housed dead flowers, and, during the show, butterflies, which were subsequently released to float around Paris. That showstopper, along with the rest of the collection, was widely seen as one of the highlights of Paris Fashion Week.

The showroom’s perimeter was flanked with racks of Undercover clothes from that season and from its most recent collection, Fall / Winter 2024, which Takahashi showed in Paris only a couple of weeks prior. Most of the collection was already out of the building, on loan to be shot by various magazines.

The second floor, which houses Undercover’s design team, was bustling with activity, with scissor-wielding pattern makers plugging away with gusto. Takahashi’s office took up the entire upper floor (he also has a design studio in the countryside, about an hour away from Tokyo, where he can work without his CEO duties interfering with his design duties, and where he can also draw and paint.) In the office there is a full DJ setup, a pair of enormous restored 1970s Altec Lansing speakers and amplifiers, the holy grail of many an audiophile. A Rick Owens stool with a deer antler for support stands to the side.

Takahashi’s desk houses a desktop iMac. In front of the desk stands a large wooden floor lamp, and to one side of it a row of shelves, each section containing a scrapbook that is the departure point for each Undercover collection. In the middle of the room stood a Grace doll that Takahashi made from disemboweled teddy bears and metal. Three boxes of white teddy bears, awaiting their execution, sat on the floor nearby. On the wall behind the speakers was a large abstract painting. Takahashi’s own artwork stood shyly against the side wall by the entrance.

We sat at a long wooden table on chairs that Takahashi makes and sells, their backs bearing the same encircled “A.” Anarchy, of a controlled kind, has been Takahashi’s ethos since he launched Undercover in 1990. No fashion designer has imbued his work with the punk spirit the way Takahashi has done over his long and fruitful career.

Takahashi was born in 1969 in a small town called Kiryu. His parents led a solid middle-class life, running a small building maintenance and cleaning business. Early on in childhood Takahashi showed aptitude for drawing, and as a teenager he quickly gravitated towards classical rock and punk and to films with a surreal and macabre twist. He had three friends that shared his tastes, and he sourced record recommendations from one of the friend’s older brother. Takahashi found refuge in culture from the conservative small-town life and from the bland pop culture that most of his peers consumed. He also found that this quiet rebellion was liberating.

People like Takahashi are cultural refugees who inevitably flee their provincial surroundings for the cultural centers that offer freedom, opportunity, a feeling of acceptance and access to like-minded people. Takahashi’s aptitude for drawing earned him a place at Tokyo’s Bunka college, where he enrolled into a fashion design program. “I did not think I was talented enough to become an artist,” he said, “but I thought I could use my drawing skills to become a fashion designer.”

While he was in high school, a store opened in a nearby town; one of the brands it carried was Comme des Garçons, designed by Rei Kawakubo, who is widely seen as the godmother of the Japanese fashion avant-garde. Takahashi was smitten by the intricate patterns of the clothing, by how unconventional they looked. Later on in Tokyo he saw a couple of garments by the Belgian conceptual designer Martin Margiela. “I was again shocked,” Takahashi said. He recalled a top made only of two squares of fabric, with the seams turned inside out, their thread trailing all the way to the floor. That top broke all the rules of clothes-making he knew. And Takahashi wanted to break the rules.

Takahashi was not the best of students at Bunka, thanks to Tokyo’s bourgeoning nightclub scene. He would often party until morning and then falling asleep in class. But Takahashi had flair and charisma. He frequented the punk club nights, sourcing punk gear during the day, often ending up at Robot, the Harajuku store that produced replicas of clothes from Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s line Seditionaries, under license from Westwood. Back in the ‘70s, through designs they sold at their London store, Westwood and McLaren became pioneers of mixing clothing and music, particularly punk, and in the late ‘80s that countercultural spirit, what McLaren referred to as “the look of music, the sound of fashion,” still had a place in fashion. A subset of Japanese youth, including Takahashi, was obsessed with Westwood and punk.

During one of these club nights, Takahashi ran into Hiroshi Fujiwara. Fujiwara was only a few years older but already influential. He was a DJ, and a member of the International Stussy Tribe, a loose collective of creators cultivated by Shawn Stussy, the original American streetwear designer. Most importantly, he had a column in the local underground magazine Takarajima called “Last Orgy,” in which he documented his travels to cultural hotbeds like London and New York, and provided music and film recommendations. The youth of the Upper Harajuku hung onto his every word.

Fujiwara liked Takahashi’s punk look and struck up a conversation with him. Eventually, they became friends. Soon after they met Vivienne Westwood put on a fashion show in Tokyo at the invitation of her Japanese supporters, one of which was Hitomi Okawa, the founder of the legendary Japanese brand MILK, which for decades was an essential part of the Harajuku uniform. Both Fujiwara and Takahashi walked in that show.

Their other mutual friend was NIGO, who was at Bunka the year below Takahashi, and who eventually became Fujiwara’s assistant (NIGO possessed an uncanny resemblance to Fujiwara, and got his moniker because in Japanese language “nigo” means “second.”) At some point Fujiwara suggested that NIGO and Takahashi take over his column, which they did, renaming it “Last Orgy 2.” They also opened a small shop in Harajuku, called “Nowhere.”

Nowhere was divided into two sides. On the one side NIGO sold the vintage Americana he collected. On the other side Takahashi sold silk-screened t-shirts of his own designs that he made himself. Because of the amateur nature of their offerings and the simultaneous popularity of their magazine column, the pair kept running out of stock, and eventually long lines of teenagers began to form each day in front of Nowhere, hoping to buy anything they could get their hands on. Through sporadic replenishment of stock Takahashi and NIGO accidentally pioneered the drop model, later copied by the street juggernaut Supreme, and just about every other brand thereafter.

In the early ‘90s Upper Harajuku, or Ura-Hara for short, was imbued with the spirit of youth subcultures. Takahashi remembers it as a place of community, where kids did their own thing, ran their own small shops and galleries – he recalled NIGO making the bracelets he sold at Nowhere on a bench in front of the store – and in the evening all went out for beer and smoked weed together. Today, just like SoHo in London and Williamsburg in New York, Harajuku is an outdoor mall, in which every square meter is maximized for consumption. Undercover is one of the last holdouts, though one must wonder for how long. Recently, Takahashi lamented on his Instagram the closing of the cheap and cheerful curry shop that he frequented during his college years. Instead, you can buy an Instagrammable pastel-colored dessert on seemingly every Harajuku corner.

Takahashi is one of the few designers who can claim to be the progenitor of merging streetwear and fashion, long before it became trendy. He has always given the same weight to designing a graphic for a t-shirt as he did to a tailored coat, and his fashion collections have always mixed streetwear and high fashion elements. But his Ura-Hara stage lasted only several years. Takahashi was not content to crank out graphic tees, nor did he want to be pigeonholed as a youth designer. He wanted to do what Kawakubo and Margiela were doing. In 1993 Takahashi put on his first full-fledged fashion show in Tokyo, which took his already cult label to a new level.

One of the people who noticed Takahashi’s success was none other than Kawakubo, who sent her compliments by fax. Eventually, the two became friendly, though most of their communication continued to be via a fax. Kawakubo told Takahashi that he will outgrow Tokyo quickly and that if he really wants to show his clothes to the world, he must eventually show in Paris. Another person who urged Takahashi to go to Paris was the esteemed Japanese fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa. In Japan, the fashion press tends to be uncritical, both in the spirit of politeness and for fear of offending. But not Hirakawa, who has lived in both London and Paris, and who had a reputation for being fiercely intelligent and knowledgeable. Hirakawa told Takahashi that limiting himself to Tokyo was cowardly. “I was angry, but I also agreed with him,” Takahashi said. Despite his criticism, Hirakawa held Takahashi in high regard, and accompanied him on his first trip to Paris in order to help Takahashi source show venues and find the right PR company.

Kawakubo also threw her already considerable weight behind Takahashi, personally inviting editors and buyers to the first Undercover show. Ahead of the show, she hosted a dinner for the Undercover team at Davé, the Chinese restaurant that was popular with the Paris fashion crowd.

On the day of the show Takahashi was beyond nervous. But he knew exactly what he wanted to say with his collection, titled SCAB, a tribute to crust punk. He also knew that his debut had to be powerful, the way Kawakubo’s and Yamamoto’s were in 1981, when in one fell swoop the pair turned Western fashion conventions upside down. And so out went super-destroyed black denim jeans and jackets, complex layering, and precise tailoring, a combination of the DIY punk spirit and high craftsmanship. It was a triumph. “That effervescent inventiveness [in Paris] was left to the Japanese designers, including a debut collection from Jun Takahashi of Tokyo, whose Undercover line combined in its unfinished threads an edgy political statement and an eerie beauty,” wrote Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune.

Since then Takahashi has continuously wowed the fashion establishment with shows equally steeped in innovation and cultural references. His last collection before the pandemic, titled “Fallen Man,” was based on Akira Kurosawa’s film “Throne of Blood,” and featured a performance choreographed by Damien Jalet. In the final scene of the show the audience gasped as magnetic arrows rained down from the ceiling around the performers, mimicking the final scene of the film.

Despite not wanting to be confined to the Ura-Hara scene of his youth, throughout his long career Takahashi has stuck to his youth subculture guns, characterized by the early Undercover motto, “We Make Noise, Not Clothes.” “Jun is the only designer from the Ura-Hara scene who knows that true creation comes from and with pain,” Hirakawa, the fashion critic, told me.

2.

My first Undercover show was in the summer of 2009 at the Pitti Uomo mens trade fair in Florence. I was a beginner journalist, with only three articles under my belt and on my first press trip. At Pitti, Takahashi showed a menswear collection based on the work of the iconic German industrial designer Dieter Rams. The models walked around the central fountain of Palazzo Pitti, their techwear garments cut with laser-focused precision, the iconic details of Rams’s designs reimagined as sartorial details – knobs became buttons, speaker grills became vents. Rams’s signature orange flashed here and there.

After the show Takahashi put on a live performance during which he and his crew made a Grace doll on top of a hill adjacent to the fountain, accompanied by a musician who was wielding a keyboard synchronized with a strobe light. The audience was confused. Italian women in their sparkly, body con evening dresses, who were already mad that they had to swipe their high heels for flip-flops in order to make it up the hill, were looking at Takahashi and his team disemboweling white teddy bears on stage to the strange sounds of noise music emanating from a weird-looking instrument. What was this?

What this was was pure Undercover, uncompromising in its strangeness. Takahashi’s ethos is mixing the innocent and the twisted into a slightly sinister amalgamation that is uniquely his own. One of the most emblematic Undercover images is a teddy bear with a screw in his head. In Undercover’s current collection there is a leather bag embossed not with a logo, but with a pattern of razor blades. There is also a pin with an adorable white cat that pronounces “Judgment day is coming.”

Takahashi continues to mine the most remote corners of culture that informed his formative years, from the music of Joy Division and The Jesus and Mary Chain to the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Takahashi doesn’t always get it right – sometimes the graphic elements taken from these cultural artifacts seem superimposed onto the clothes rather than embedded into them – but when he does, the results shine with the kind of determined brilliance that is an increasingly rare commodity in today’s fashion.

Takahashi also seems keenly aware of the danger of being too predictable, and so he is apt to switch up his themes. The women’s collection he showed in Paris in March was about the everyday life of women. Of course, this is being Takahashi, he got the esteemed German film director Wim Wenders to write a poem for the show, and to recite it as its soundtrack. The clothes appeared simple, but only at first glance.

Undercover is still more popular in Japan than outside of it, though it has a sizable following in the West. It could probably be larger, but Western consumers pay a roughly 40% premium for Japanese fashion due to import costs, which make the clothes very expensive. It’s a conundrum that Takahashi has to face continuously – simplify in the name of affordability and you lose cachet, keep up design and production standards, and you risk pricing out your fans.

What Takahashi has going for him is an incredible amount of good will, both from the industry and from his customers. Undercover shows routinely garner rave reviews, and Takahashi’s early designs in particular enjoy a cult following among a new generation of fans, who collect his work, particularly from the early 2000s. The destroyed “85” jeans Takahashi debuted in Paris in 2002 now fetch thousands of dollars on the reseller market, and items with graphics from bands like Joy Division and Television are also highly prized.

In Discord groups, and on Instagram accounts and websites dedicated to archival fashion, Undercover’s early shows are constantly revisited and dissected by kids barely out of their teens, who often feel that they missed out on the golden years when fashion was at its most creative. “There’s something particularly special when it comes to the period of the early to mid-2000s of Undercover. Between its first collection in 1994 and its Paris debut in 2002, the brand was gradually refining its fusion of counter-cultural roots into fashion,” Riviere Fougy, founder of @archivepdf, one such account, told me. “It’s evident that Takahashi-san’s transition from his origins in Japan and the Ura-Hara movement to the Paris runway only exemplified this fusion, culminating in what many consider as the golden age of Undercover. From S/S 2003 ‘Scab’ to A/W 2005 ‘Arts and Crafts’ and S/S 2006 ‘T’, the collections of this era are still held in high regard and sought after to this very day, with the clothes achieving a level of refinement that is all-encompassing.”

3.

Takahashi’s attitude may be forever young, but the march of age is inexorable. During the pandemic Takahashi moved to the countryside, and he has been enjoying the peace that came with the move. He is now building a house there, and he has been diving into interior design with the same gusto he normally reserves for music and film. He sees his future house as a sanctuary. During our interview Takahashi, who is 54, said that his thoughts increasingly turn to mortality. This is the second time he mentioned this to me. The first was backstage after his Spring / Summer 2024 women’s show, which featured a lot of veiling, which in Takahashi’s telling symbolized death.

He has also gone back to painting, casting off his early doubts about greatness. Takahashi’s painting style is similar to his clothes, in which the normal is overlaid with the surreal. One of his paintings features a man with an erased face, an apple hovering in front of it. Another, a version of the painting Takahashi used for the cover of the Rizzoli book on Undercover, features a female figure with her face covered by white plaster. Last year Takahashi held a well-received solo show of his paintings at Gallery Target in Tokyo.

Music is another thing that remains a constant in Takahashi’s life. During the pandemic, he began putting out playlists on Spotify, called Kosmik Music. They have caught on and become a subgenre of Takahashi’s creative output, with its own audience, which has resulted in a collaboration with NTS, a popular independent global music radio station known for its deep dives into underground music.

These forays into other forms of creativity are not exactly an escape from Takahashi’s work as a fashion designer, but they take his mind off of it. Takahashi seems to be keenly aware that with his brand he is at constant crossroads. Undercover is now a fairly large business that is built on subculture material. A big cult brand is somewhat of an oxymoron. To satisfy a large audience, one must inevitably simplify. And Takahashi, with his streetwear roots, can do simple well. But will an expanded audience get his cultural references that were once the lingua franca of Gen X, but are now consigned to the backrooms of contemporary culture that prizes lowest common denominator pop? A couple of months ago, Takahashi posted on his Instagram, in apparent frustration, that he will continue to use cultural references in his work, even if people don’t get it.

“It’s a big company now,” Takahashi said, “and I’m also its CEO. So I have to listen to what the sales people say. But not when it comes to creating clothes for my shows.”

In this stance Takahashi is entirely right. He is one of the very few auteurs left in fashion, and auteurship is Takahashi’s central tenet. Most prominent designers outsource aspects of their shows to other professionals, famous stylists or trendy music curators. Takahashi does everything himself. An auteur owns his success and his failure. There is nowhere to hide. Creation comes from and with pain