Anyone who has ever attended (or watched) one of Jun Takahashi’s physical Undercover shows can attest to the grandiose spectacle that occurs when lights are dimmed and models appear in the Japanese designer’s creations. Personally, I’ll never forget when the acclaimed British fashion critic Sarah Mower snuck me into the designer’s AW 2017 Paris show: Nothing but utter silence could be heard from the audience as models paraded in long feathered bustles and grand, accordion-pleated boleros representing kings and queens of old.
For his Women’s Spring Summer 2021 collection, Takahashi orchestrated no fashion show, yet the spectacle remained nonetheless. Entitled ‘The Sixth Sense’, it was conceived as a narrative of six distinct groups that illustrate the plurality of UNDERCOVER. Whilst the designer often observes uniforms within social groups (be those royal, religious or military), here his women’s collection is the sort of creep to the skin that viewers often experience at his physical presentations: a dip into the Undercover world, distilled to its most potent ends. In the first scenario titled ‘Pablo’ and pictured above, Takahashi took inspiration from the painter Pablo Picasso’s early 20th century ‘Blue Period’, exploring the links with his own artistic practice by showing his own oil paintings transferred onto utilitarian uniforms. In these images photographed by Katsuhide Morimoto, the models embody both the artist and the works of art, a copy of the original painting within spitting distance of each model. The hair took on an asymmetrical bob and was layered in crimp and topped with a soft felt bicorn hat, much like those of Picasso’s harlequin boy clowns of the 1910s and 1920s.