Sea and Spots: Givenchy and Junya Watanabe

JUNYA WATANABE, LOOK 13; GIVENCHY, LOOK 9

 

Junya Watanabe
In the design department, Junya Watanabe is a man’s man. For spring, he’s gone nautically French, which translates into a top deck seaside blue blazer worn with a red gingham check shirt, ample ecru trousers, and a pair of deck shoes sans socks. When it comes to this look, Watanabe is obsessively true to form. “Is he kidding?” you might be tempted to ask about the stripes, the colors, the rough fabrics, and cuts. But it seems that Mr. Watanabe is a sincere sailor who is eternally striving to achieve ship-shape perfection. And he did that in this collection. It’s all in the details, like blazer sleeves cropped to flash a wide slice of cuff: Popeye in his Sunday best.

Givenchy
With the audience assembled in a snaky coil, Riccardo Tisci had summoned tension before the Givenchy show began. Tisci has become one of Paris’s preeminent style showmen, creating an eerie mood  above and beyond his collections.  Lace blouses for men, some with Elizabethan ruff collars, are not for everybody.  And that was just the opener.  The “ladies,” were admirably represented at this show by Tisci’s trans muse, Lea T, who channeled a high 70s Marisa Berenson in her kinky mane heyday. Tisci’s men, dressed–or should I say molded–in Diane Arbus freak show leopard prints (everything from suits to Lycra shorts, combined with black or white) are unabashedly raunchy. But then, as Diana Vreeland, who would have loved this collection, once said: “There’s nothing wrong with bad taste; it’s no taste I can’t stand!”