Jun Takahashi: Designer, Artist, Auteur

When he was a child, Jun Takahashi’s parents would lock him in the coal shed if he misbehaved. Darkness, fear… he knew them well. With time, he grew to love his nightmares. The dark, fantastic ones inspired him. He rarely had happy dreams. But lately, his nightmares have begun to depress him. They’re too realistic, too reflective of the outside world, which has taken a turn for the nightmarish that outpaces his nocturnal excursions.

And so Takahashi paints. It’s become a passion for him. His last spring women’s collection for his Undercover brand featured his own artwork. Eerie, eyeless, macabre. How does fashion’s purest auteur see himself now? Designer? Artist? He claims he doesn’t really think like that. “A person who loves making something,” is his humble preference. “That’s how I’ve been since I was a kid.” Turning fifty a few years ago was a milestone. For the first time, he says, he finally felt his work settling, stabilising. A newly spiritual bent inspired by his readings in Buddhism definitely helped.

But then came the global paroxysm of the pandemic. If Takahashi was overjoyed to return to Paris in September 2022 after a 30-month hiatus, he was clearly haunted, too. Last September, he showed a sumptuously melancholic womenswear collection inspired by the angels returned to earth in Wim Wenders’ cult movie “Wings of Desire.” Takahashi spoke of the collection as a requiem for everyone he’d lost. He admitted he felt stuck and was looking to be released like the butterflies in the terrarium dresses in the show’s breathtaking finale. He wished he could join the angels.

Out of that morbid train of thought came a men’s collection for winter built around “Twin Peaks” and the familiar image of Laura Palmer, recently deceased. But isn’t it some kind of truism that the darkest hour comes just before dawn? The collection for women that followed in February was a ray of light. What happened to change Takahashi’s outlook? He claims his personal life had settled in those intervening months. “I’m now looking forward to spending the rest of my life in peace.”

And, as vindication for everyone who’s ever said there is no such thing as coincidence, Wenders was instrumental in Jun’s enlightenment. He’d seen “Perfect Days,” the director’s celluloid paean to the life of a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo and taken his transfiguration of the ordinary to heart. So, Takahashi asked him to write a poem to go with his new collection. Wenders came back with “Watching a Working Woman,” another paean, this time rendering the daily routine of a 40-year-old single mother in stunning, life-affirming detail. Wenders also offered to read it.

Takahashi showed a sartorial complement to Wenders’ restrained recitation, but, as emotion steadily, inevitably accumulated on the soundtrack, so the collection edged into the wayward artistry that makes him one of fashion’s most reliable thrillers. Belgian model icon Roos Van Bosstraeten opened the show in jeans and a camisole (configured with typical artistry virtuosity as one piece) and closed it in a tracksuit exploding into golden tinsel, with a long gilded train to match. The most perfect expression of the extraordinary in the ordinary that a wide-eyed dreamer could wish for, but also the perfect Takahashi hybrid of streetwear and high fashion. Rawness and sophistication.

He feels that hybrids have been the key to his commercial success. But on a deeper level, it’s also the key to Takahashi’s personality. There is often the sense in his clothes of something about to burst out from inside, like “Alien” or any David Cronenberg movie (and even he would be hard-pressed to conjure up something as hellishly disturbing as the grinning cosmetic surgery masks from Takahashi’s women’s collection for Winter 2015). Jun once described himself as, “Normal on the outside, alien on the inside.” Today, he talks about how his curiosity is always driving him to remake himself. He is his own hybrid. “I Hold a Beast, an Angel and a Madman in Me,” is the quote he chose from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to theme his Spring 2020 men’s collection.

That goes some way to explaining why his shows are so gloriously unpredictable, in the way that his last women’s show had a distinct, profound emphasis on individual humanity which felt like a shift from the grand tribal gestures that have previously defined Takahashi’s work. Like “Perfect Days,” the movie that inspired it, an intimate engagement rather than a big picture. He agreed. “It’s definitely more personality, more individualism.” But he insisted that his next show — the men’s collection he’s presenting on Wednesday in Paris — would be completely different. I was angling for a preview. He was having none of it, though he conceded his new collection would be maybe even more personal, in that it would be about his own personality. Autobiographical then? “Kind of,” came the muted response.

Takahashi’s collections have often reflected societal concerns. My favourite example: winter 2017′s mind-bending extravaganza with its ten meticulously, ornately dressed tribes of aristocrats, soldiers, rebels and royalty was, he suggested at the time, a meditation on the global swing towards populism. Its last tribe, an eerie hybrid of humans and bugs, prefigured AI. Not the first time eeriness and prescience went hand in hand in an Undercover collection. The following year’s winter collection, “We Are Infinite,” drew on “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and the iconography of American high schools. Two weeks before the show, a shooter killed 14 students and three staff members at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

Lately, given the burgeoning authoritarian distaste for women’s hard-won freedoms, it must have felt like an appropriate moment to celebrate a woman’s right to live her life as she saw fit, which the Takahashi-Wenders collab did so lyrically. And so to the boys. We’re constantly assured by men that a man’s world is increasingly hard for them. Might this be something Takahashi is engaging with in his new collection? “It doesn’t really contain the political thing that much,” he said. “It’s more what’s around me. We don’t really know what’s true. Should we believe this publication, that news? I believe my responsibility is to the people I care about. So this collection doesn’t really contain the big picture, like politics. It’s the small world of my own life.” Still, Takahashi did acknowledge that the big world is absolutely polluted by men and their decisions — “Men are always the ones that start the wars” — so he conceded that his show would spotlight the dark side of masculinity, and that was something he recognized in himself. The control, the dominance. “I want to make myself more humble, not be so greedy. With this attitude, being humble, I can at least affect my own surroundings. So I’m not focusing on changing society, just focusing on myself.”

Jun turns 55 in September. When he takes off that big hat he’s always wearing, he has a full head of white hair. He said he doesn’t really go out much anymore, maybe once a month, with his girlfriend or his son, or his year-old Jack Russell pup. “I’m not so interested in young people, or what’s happening in Tokyo. I’m getting old, I want to have a slow life.” He insisted it’s mountains and ocean vistas that absorb him now. “They’re much bigger than street culture.” Shock! Horror! Jonio, erstwhile rooster-haired teenage front man of the Tokyo Sex Pistols has turned into a nature-loving homebody.

Except that’s not strictly so. Once a punk, always a punk. Jun believes that. “It’s the core of my personality, the root. At the same time, I believe my attitude is more directed to peace and justice.” But he’s still drawn to the original rebellious, challenging essence of punk, even if he listens more to post-punk and experimental music now. Where is that spirit in pop culture today? We need it badly. “What’s happening all over the world is obviously really bad,” Takahashi agreed ruefully. “At some point, I believe people just feel powerless. They don’t feel there’s anything they can do with these emotions. Maybe that’s why there’s no punk anymore.” He’s not happy about that.

Fashion, on the other hand, he sees as a safe place for creative people to do whatever they want, regardless of what’s going on in the world. “It’s difficult to see these big houses doing big things financially,” Takahashi concedes, “because we’re such a small independent company, but at the same time, what we can do as an independent company is stay as individual as possible, to express what we do.” But while Undercover is the best advertisement for the opportunities independence offers, the brutal constraints of time and money also make it impossible for Takahashi to realise other dreams.

He’d love to make a movie, for instance. He imagines a hybrid of film noir, horror and fantasy, with costumes by him, of course. His passion for film has inspired some of his greatest moments, none more so than the finale of Winter 2020′s men’s show, which ended in a rain of arrows “borrowed” from the last scene of “Throne of Blood,” Akira Kurosawa’s Macbeth-as-samurai masterpiece. Takahashi has quoted Kubrick, too. But his cinematic kindred spirit is surely David Lynch, the director who could plumb the depraved depths of “Blue Velvet” then create something as gentle and sweet-spirited as “The Straight Story.” Jun takes the compliment. He feels he goes backwards and forwards between darkness and purity, just like Lynch.

On our Zoom call, his translator Asumi Tsurumoto was wearing a t-shirt promoting Vanishing Point, a track by a maxi-cult Japanese band named Blankey Jet City, who broke up at the beginning of the century. Takahashi raved about them so I headed for YouTube. The footage is furious. It’s the sort of arcana that you expect from his world. He’s knee-deep in wondrous cultural cross-references from the worlds of music, film and art. I’m really none the wiser about what Wednesday’s show may hold, but I do know it will offer enlightenment of some kind. And my life will be better for it.