Menswear’s post-punk informal normcore from the mid-1990s is to modern streetwear what 1950s Ivy League is to 1960s prep, mod, and rock: a singular starting point from which later varieties and sub-species of wearable culture would branch. This Undercover collection—very Larry Clark, Jenny Holzer, ’90s skate and grunge, with a trace of surf—seemed to hark nostalgically back to a moment when generic brands and garment types, from Gap and Dickies to stadium jackets and check flannel shirts, were fixed in time by the experience-shaped attitude of their Gen-X wearers.
Yet this being Undercover, the collection came with undercurrents, undertones, and what the sparse press note called “subtle disruptions,” placed there by Jun Takahashi as glitches that added richness. And as the designer was unavailable to speak, it seems much more truthful to relay the words he placed on his garments than to project words into his mouth.
“The Honest Liar,” tellingly mirrored, read as much like a film title as a collection theme. Some garments, including a raw-hemmed military field jacket crossed with a PT hoodie, were gently Frankenstein-ed hybrids. There was disruptive pocket placement, free-association doodle graphics, and, on several pieces, a more constructed motif that placed the word “Memory” next to a tangle of illustration. At times, the annotative allusions and visual tics that seasoned these clothes read like someone else’s diary entry: semi-private and only partially fathomable. You didn’t quite know what it was about.
Undercoverists will understand that these undercoverisms are the point. Both in womenswear and men’s Takahashi specializes in applying a livening psychological charge to the apparently inert banality of conventional clothing archetypes. Here those clothes were—undercoverisms apart—loose, easy-to-wear, and often appealingly plain: overshirts, coach jackets, sweatshirts, cargo pants, baggy shorts, check shirts, striped button-downs, and wide trousers, worn with scribbled-on apparently-Vans sneakers and slogan socks. It was a period piece, a return to the source, made weightier with inscrutable twists of decorative retrospection.
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