source: modaeasdblogspot
Junya Watanabe es un diseñador japones. En 1992, comenzó a diseñar una línea que lleva su nombre, dentro de Comme des Garçons y, al año siguiente, presentó su primer colección en Paris.
A Junya Watanabe se lo conoce dentro del ambiente del diseño de moda por su ropa distintiva e innovadora. Trabaja con telas sintéticas y tejidos nobles. Es considerado como una diseñador de “alta costura tecno”, ya que para la confección de sus colecciones utiliza materiales modernos y técnicas de avanzada.
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source: vogue
Graphic girls as living dolls and clothes as performance as opposed to clothes for performance: This was what could be found in Junya Watanabe’s latest collection for Spring. There were certainly no heavily researched breathable fibers, just lots of warm leatherette (especially appropriate in a Grace Jones à la Jean-Paul Goude way) alongside PVC, Perspex, and the occasional jolt of tulle…oh, and rubber swimming caps.

Here, a yearning for the certainties/uncertainties of an early 20th-century avant-garde past seemed apparent—as it has for a fair few designers this season. In Watanabe’s case, there seemed to be an echoing of Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Orphism—particularly Sonia’s performance-based pieces and a synthesis of her and her circle’s fashion work that emerged after the Great War—Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe in its various influential forms, and Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire that began in 1916. In short, if you were looking to Watanabe for a nice pair of patchwork jeans for Spring, forget it.

Instead, Watanabe’s “patchwork madness” collection of last season—which had already begun the process of morphing into something much more abstract in many of its circular shapes, volumes, and constructions—was here turned into “graphic marching.” Those are the latest defining words of the designer.

In many ways, that idea of graphic marching ties in with the thought of the “machine-age” woman of the first half of the last century—and here she was almost like the literal incarnation of the poster girl, wearing flattened vinyl circular forms and experimental compositions, marching ever forward. But what can’t be ignored in this collection, either, is the pop synthesis that conflates different periods of time. Close up, there was as much Michael Alig-style ’90s club kid in there as there was Cocteau and Satie’s Cubist ballet, Parade. Not to mention Rei Kawakubo’s “flat” collection for Comme des Garçons for Fall 2012 and Watanabe’s own history of formal experiments in pleating or his love of Breton stripes. And certainly, if we are talking about graphic girls as living dolls and clothing as performance, the street-style contingent cannot be ignored—they will lap up this collection, tailor made as it is to turn them into living tear sheets. And in this way, what Watanabe did today was as much 2014 as 1914, 1994, or 1984, and it both comments on and furthers the graphic march of people as corporeal Tumblrs. God help us.
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source: voguees
Como otros creadores japoneses, Junya Watanabe se muestra escueto y conciso en las entrevistas. No en vano, prefiere que sea su ropa la que diga todo lo que él tiene que decir.

Nació en los sesenta en Fukushima (Japón). Se graduó en el prestigioso Bunka Fashion College de Tokio y, poco después, logró hacerse con un puesto en Comme des Garçons, concretamente dentro de la línea de punto de la firma.

Respaldado por la diseñadora de Comme des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo, sacó al mercado su propia línea, siempre auspiciado bajo el paraguas de la marca nodriza. Con los años ha expandido los tentáculos de la firma y se ha diversificado creando una línea para hombres –una facción que le ha reportado no pocas alegrías– y asociándose, mediante colaboraciones, a otras marcas como Loewe o Puma.

Provocador incansable y creador conceptual donde los haya, Kawakubo, su mentora, se refiere a él como uno de sus ‘cocombatientes’ en el ejército de Comme des Garçons y dice que es perfeccionista y meticuloso a la hora de trabajar. Lo demuestra temporada tras temporada, librando su particular batalla contra las convenciones y lo correcto deconstruyendo y recomponiendo las reglas del diseño de moda.