…and other garments. The words on shirt at Valentino has a relatively long history in luxury fashion

Valentino (left) shirt from the recent spring/summer 2024 season and Junya Watanabe MAN Comme des Garçons (right) from spring/summer 2002. Photos: respective brands

We are not talking about the slogan T-shirt. That itself has been around, we believe, since tees were worn on their own, rather than as undergarments, or when graphics, textual too, were slapped on them. We are talking about text on shirts. And we bring this up because, for us, the debut of Junya Watanabe MAN Comme des Garçons in 2002 was a seminal time for Mr Watanabe, and menswear in general. That collection is always fresh in our mind because of what the CDG alum had done—made wearable clothes and seemingly basic men’s staple seriously alluring. But more importantly, the typographic treatment applied on the tops of the debut line appealed to the consistent reader in us, as well as lover of text.

Forward two decades later, Valentino reprised the idea of applying English alphabets on garments in their recent spring/summer 2024 show, staged days earlier. As with the Junya Watanabe shirt shown above (right), the words are in san-serif font, with a density that could be ‘book’, and applied horizontally across the bodice, ending just above the waist of the trousers (or shorts, as in Valentino’s version). They kept the text tone-on-tone (at first reading, we thought it was a quote from Depeche Mode’s 2005 hit Precious: “things get broken…”!), as a subtle treatment, rather than Junya Watanabe’s in contrast colour. Both paragraphic placements are differentiated by Mr Watanabe’s deliberate spaces between words.

Junya Watanabe MAN Comme des Garçons is now just Junya Watanabe, but their first menswear season featuring what was already the world’s longest brand name (made even longer with the brand’s collaboration with The North Face) at the time, will always remain in our heart. The collection vividly showed that text could be used as prints the way other designers employ flowers or graffiti. And that they could also be applied on top of checked fabrics, as opposed to what is the common practice—on white, for legibility. But what is decipherable to us is whose came first.