Junya Watanabe x Levi’s Denim Jeans with Pleated Inserts

The Levi's collaboration is the longest-running conversation in Junya Watanabe's work, and it has never been a logo exercise. What he does with Levi's is consistent and well documented: he takes the most fixed garment there is, a jean whose proportions have been settled for a century, and opens it up. Panels are spliced in, other cloths are introduced, and the jean comes back altered in its construction rather than in its finish. That is why the partnership has lasted as long as it has. The subject is not a graphic, so there is no end to it.

This pair is that method carried out with pleats. The body is cotton denim and the inserts are polyester, pleated. Setting a pleated panel into a denim leg puts two cloths with opposite instincts into one garment: denim is stiff, takes a fold badly, and gets its shape from weight, while a pleated synthetic is light and holds a fold permanently, because in a thermoplastic fiber the fold is set into the fiber rather than pressed into the cloth. So the insert is not decoration. It is where the leg gets its width, and that width opens rather than having been cut. The waistband is elastic, which tells you plainly what sort of trouser this was meant to be, and the Levi's patch sits at the back where it has always sat.

A collaboration is usually a name borrowed for a season. This is a garment taken apart and put back together differently, and the pleated inserts are the part of it you can point at and explain to somebody.

Junya Watanabe designs under his own name inside Comme des Garçons, and the Levi's work is one of the clearest records of how he builds, which is by splicing rather than by drawing.

One hundred percent cotton in the body, with inserts of one hundred percent polyester, pleated. Made in Japan. Wide leg, elastic waistband, and the Levi's patch at the back. Color: black. We do not hold a weight for the denim, and we cannot tell you where in the leg the inserts sit or how many of them there are.

An elastic waistband accommodates a range rather than a measurement, so the waist is the least of the decisions and the leg is very nearly all of it. A pleated insert carries stored width, which means the trouser reads narrower standing than it does walking, and that is worth knowing before it is judged on a hanger. Denim has no give of its own and the inserts have all of it, so this trouser moves where the polyester is and holds still everywhere else.

With the White Drapy Top or the Silver Sequin Top, so the trouser supplies the structure and the top supplies the surface. Under the Junya Watanabe Leather Patchwork Jacket, which is the pairing where both garments are built out of pieces and say so. A shoe with some weight to it: the leg is wide and a slight shoe disappears underneath it.

The denim decides the wash and the inserts decide the iron. Wash cold and inside out, as seldom as the wearing allows, and keep the trouser out of a dryer. Never press the inserts. A pleat in a polyester is set into the fiber with heat, and a domestic iron is hot enough to take it back out permanently. Our care guidance covers denim in more detail.

The Black Denim Bell-Bottom Jeans is the black pair with the white pocket lining, and the Low Rise Jeans is the indigo stone wash. Junya Watanabe has his own account of the house on the Comme des Garçons designer page.