THE CONTROLLED ANARCHY OF JUN TAKAHASHI

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

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

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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.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion at the Met Museum

Fashion

The 220 artifacts for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, the latest exhibit by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan museum of art in New York, opening to the public this Friday, were drawn from its archives with the stated aim of “reviving [their] sensory capacities.” After all, clothes are not just for looking at; they are tactile objects, and they smell. Or so the exhibit tried to remind us, in a rather clumsy way, by jumping through some snazzy scientific hoops that I doubt an average exhibit visitor will care about. In real life the olfactory experience of clothes has to do more with their wearer, that ineffable familiar smell of your lover, for example, an experience diametrically opposed to what was offered, the smell of dead, disembodied clothes. To their credit, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Institute, and his staff, are well aware of this, but their attempts at resuscitating the sartorial corpses felt forced.

Op-Ed: The Avant-Garde Post Mortem

Culture, Fashion

When I founded StyleZeitgeist in 2006, my aim was to build a forum for people who genuinely love fashion as a creative discipline that speaks to a wider culture. I did not mean for it to solely concentrate on the fashion that I loved, the forward-thinking, boundary-pushing, one connected to youth culture, especially music, especially of the goth / industrial / postpunk-tinged kind. But it kind of morphed into that, because it attracted like-minded people. And so StyleZeitgeist became a hub for what’s come to be called the avant-garde – the truly IYKYK stuff, a fashion subculture.