Junya Watanabe does not run a house of his own. He designs inside one. He joined Comme des Garçons in 1984, after studying design at Bunka Fashion College, and from 1987 worked on the company’s Tricot line. In 1992 he presented a first collection under his own name, for women, from inside the company; it showed in Tokyo and reached Paris a year after that. His menswear, Junya Watanabe MAN, arrived in Paris for spring and summer 2001. The company around all of it is set out on our Comme des Garçons page, and this page assumes it rather than repeating it.
The arrangement is worth stating plainly, because the two things it is most often mistaken for are both wrong. It is not a diffusion line, a secondary label built out of a primary one. It is not an independent label that a larger company distributes, either. It is a designer with his own name on his own collections, showing on his own in Paris, working inside a company he did not found. The short version: the company is Comme des Garçons, and one of the people designing inside it is Junya Watanabe.
The clearest short demonstration of how he works is the Levi’s collaboration, which has recurred over many seasons and is among the better-known things about his work. Levi Strauss & Co. describes it well in its own account. He took the patterns for their classic five-pocket jean and their Trucker jacket and made the set up in a grey herringbone suiting instead of denim, and their own summary of the idea is that he takes something with history and a traditional shape and makes a new kind of basic out of it. Keep the pattern. Change the cloth, or the seam, or the place where the garment opens. That is a pattern cutter’s argument rather than a stylist’s, and it is why his clothes read as familiar for about a second and then stop.
It is also why they are hard to date. A garment built out of a pattern problem is either solved or it is not, and a solved one does not go off the way a garment built out of a look does.
Junya Watanabe at W Department
What we carry under his name is chosen the way we choose anything, for the garment rather than for the name stitched into it, and it sits alongside the Comme des Garçons selection rather than apart from it.
Denim is where this is easiest to see, and it is where we have gone most often. A jean is the most fixed garment in a wardrobe: five pockets, a rivet, a rise, a leg, and a long agreement about what all of that is supposed to look like. That is exactly what makes it worth taking apart, and it is why a designer who thinks in patterns keeps returning to it. What each piece does to the agreement is set out on its own page, which is where it belongs.
Sizing runs on an alpha scale and does not resolve cleanly into a US or a UK equivalent. That is true across the company rather than peculiar to his work, and it is the reason we would rather you called us than guessed. Materials are on each piece. Anything a garment will ask of you afterwards is in our care guidance.
Buying his work is not a way of buying Comme des Garçons at one remove. It is one designer’s collections, which happen to be made inside somebody else’s company, and the clothes are the reason either way.
Continue Exploring
- All Junya Watanabe. Everything of his we hold.
- Comme des Garçons. The company he designs inside, and the rest of what it makes.
- The x Levi’s Denim Jeans with Pleated Inserts. The collaboration described above, in a trouser.
- Denim. Across all the houses we work with.
- Trousers. Across all the houses we work with.
- Issey Miyake. Another Japanese house that treats a technique as the design rather than as a finish on one.
- Caring for What You Own. What to do at home, and what to leave to a specialist.
- The Library. Our writing on the houses we work with, plus the monthly playlist.
- Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.
Shop Junya Watanabe
Sizes and materials are on each piece. If you want to know how something is cut before you commit to it, call us, or come to The Plaza and put it on.