In what could be Undercover’s best collection so far, Jun Takahashi sent out illuminated terrariums-as-skirts. Weird could really be this lovely

Undercover has frequently been described as a streetwear label, and the brand’s designer/founder Jun Takahashi has often been associated with other Japanese streetwear giants such as Nigo (who, incidentally, co-founded Undercover before striking out on his own), Hiroshi Fujiwara (Fragment Design), Hiroki Nakamura (Visvim), or Shinsuke Takizawa (Neighborhood). While Undercover has irrefutably made their mark in the streetwear scene in Tokyo (and, to be sure, throughout Japan), Mr Takahashi, trained at the famed Bunka Fashion College, has always been far more accomplished in dress design than the people who buy his weirdly illustrated T-shirts and the more popular menswear give him credit for.

His spring/summer 2024 collection, dubbed Deep Mist, might change all that. Mr Takahashi has shown in Paris since 2002 (Undercover is 34 years old), and his ambiguous aesthetic has been a single constant. Despite his annual showings, not many consider his output as reverentially as compatriot Junya Watanabe’s, even when he has created remarkably inventive clothes throughout the years. This season, the collection climaxed with the lights down and the three models emerging in transparent balloon skirts, LED-lit to show terrariums (could they be aquariums, minus the fish?) within, filled with flora and fauna (did we catch sight of some butterflies roo?). Who would have expected that in the concrete space, lined in the middle with crashed chandeliers wrapped in tulle, such a delightful vision would be revealed?

Before those glowing portable and wearable greenhouses came into view, Mr Takahashi offered a pensive discourse on what elegance tempered with the street wear styling expected of him might look like. This, however, wasn’t a marriage of luxury fashion and street wear; this was far less hybridised. There was a relaxed attitude in the clothes, but they have more in common with traditional French ready-to-wear that they seemed. The pantsuits, the dresses, the separates were given a sort of misting by way of the sheerest organzas (or whatever technical fabric they could be) over them, as seen at Prada in Milan a week earlier. But Mr Takahashi’s sheer shrouding (given the catacombs-like atmosphere of the show, that seem apt), was, in fact, “deleting the design [he’d] already made to make something new”, as he told BOF through an interpreter. The new or the outer layers were sometimes complete garments on their own, with usable pockets too.

As an artist (he paints—in oils, as seen in his first solo exhibition in Tokyo last month), Mr Takahashi has incorporated his own visual mash-ups in Undercover collections (as well as in those of others, such as Valentino or, far lower down the price scale, GU). This season, the prints used were, however, based on the works of German artist Neo Rauch, who combines industrial grit with socialist realism in his mutedly coloured paintings, now considerably soften by Undercover’s alluringly forgiving silhouettes. Elsewhere, Mr Takahashi’s own paintings of faceless people were used in a three sets of tank tops and skirts that could have been made through rug hooking, but with the advantage of looking considerably finer. Even on fabric and yarn, visual art has always been a contributing factor to Undercover’s clearly less covert appeal. Now definitely more so.

Photos (top) undercover/Instagram and gorunway.com