At first glance the cuts and fabrics of Junya Watanabe’s 2012-2013 winter collection call up images of the everyday male wardrobe at its most rigorous and monotonous. Wool pinstripes, tweed overcheck, diamond patterns, suits and coats bring to mind harsh, misogynistic environments rampant with white collars.

But the well-known Japanese designer, still produced by Comme des Garçons, who became famous for his daring reworking of old industrial materials, certainly loses nothing of the visionary cyber imagery, built around a detailed Gibson and Sterling setting . The clothes always reveal their purely evocative context to more attentive observers, a collective reference to systematic subversion.

The pinstripe provides an unequivocally feminine silhouette, and the men’s pants fit into bold outwear applications usually reserved for the other hemisphere; the rigorous tweed is cut with indulgent velvet devoré, pleated pants and the typical salia wool of men’s suits are proposed as minimalist wear or as a draping cassock. And when this reassuring femininity comes to the forefront, clothed in flowing ancient fantasies of the past, reality reveals it to be merely a wrapping, apron or in metamorphosis with a far more determined basic attire.

It is an acrobatic and sensitive attack on patriarchal power, ridiculed by the eccentric, casual parade of determined women, whose colourful and bizarre intellectual horizons place them out of reach.

Now discover the F/W 2012-2013 Junya Watanabe’s collection on IVO MILAN!