Undercover

The Dark Beauty of Jun Takahashi

Jun Takahashi is tired of streetwear. Or so he says. As he approaches his fiftieth birthday—and the thirtieth anniversary of his Tokyo-based label,

UNDERCOVER— he wants more polish and more refinement.

More beauty.

We’re discussing his Spring 2020 menswear collection, an endorsement of tailored elegance that he sent down the runway in Paris just over two months ago at the beginning of summer. “The collection was meant to serve as my answer to the street fashion that’s so prevalent in the world right now,” Takahashi says over email. He chose the collection’s soft-edged, impressionistic images—photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman—specifically because they were “completely different” from the brash streetwear graphics that have flooded the runways and retail. “They’re a quiet element that stands out among the dark suits,” he says.

As he’s gotten older and more self-aware, the collection is also, quite simply, a reflection of what he’s feeling right now when he gets dressed—more tailoring, less color, fewer graphic tees and sneakers, less of the edgy streetwear he’s so well known for. “I just designed the clothes that I wanted to wear right now,” he admits. “I have always been honest about the changes taking place within myself. The collection challenges my own lack of elegance.”

Despite his newfound appreciation for sharp, sophisticated sartorialism, Takahashi clearly still has a thing for graphics. He still has a thing for horror movies, too. In the collection, alongside Sherman’s ambiguous artwork, are pleated spiderwebs and the ominous outline of Count Orlok, the vampire from F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu. Takahashi, at times, gives off the impression that he enjoys creeping people out. In his dark, anarchic universe, anti-heroes abound, apples are almost always poisoned, scabs and wounds serve as design inspiration, and teddy bears carry their severed heads underarm like helmets. Maybe more than any designer of his generation not named Rick Owens, Takahashi embraces the macabre, the grotesque, and the gothic. “I have never been interested in things that are merely beautiful, or movies with happy endings,” he says. “The expression of the ugliness inside beauty is one of the most important concepts in my work.”

UNDERCOVER’s Fall 2019 range, out now in stores, is another exercise in the beautiful ugliness that has become Takahashi’s signature. As with many of his collections, it contains an unlikely collage of graphic references. There’s Alex DeLarge, the ultraviolent, bowler-hatted anti-hero of A Clockwork Orange; Edgar Allan Poe, the literary master of the mysterious and the macabre; the surly-looking classical composer, Ludwig

van Beethoven; Italian painter Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus; enough aliens and UFOs to trigger another “Storm Area 51” campaign. This season’s women’s range, meanwhile, took as its main inspiration Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, a film about a prestigious dance academy that doubles as a witches’ coven. It’s pretty dark stuff, coming from a designer who, according to the New York Times, was supposed to be softening with age and family life, becoming “dreamier, more playful.” Then again, Takahashi has never been one to adhere to expectations, or to shy away from facing the things that scare him—even if they come from within.

UNDERCOVER, like its founder, is hard to pin down, hard to pigeonhole. Like its founder, it’s ambiguous and a little mysterious, and seemingly deals in contradictions. Owing to its origins in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood—the birthplace of Japanese streetwear—during the early ’90s, UNDERCOVER is something of a fashion unicorn: a cult brand with genuine street cred that’s also an avant-garde runway fixture.

And yet, neither UNDERCOVER nor Takahashi has ever really seemed all that interested in their status or success. The label quietly—and astoundingly, by 2019 standards—debuted its online store this past July. Takahashi himself seems disinterested in digital media or self-promotion. He rarely gives interviews, and when

he does—as he graciously did here—he shies away from discussing his personal life (“I prefer not to talk about myself,” he writes at one point). And while he is happy to talk about UNDERCOVER, it’s also clear he wants to avoid over-intellectualizing his work, as if its magic might somehow diminish in the process.

Adding to UNDERCOVER’s mystique is the fact that like Comme des Garçons, which Takahashi reveres (Rei Kawakubo was one of his earliest supporters), the label remains fiercely independent in its ownership, direction and operations. To this day, with an apparent disregard for creative block, Takahashi personally churns out four collections a year for men and women, in addition to his diffusion lines and an ongoing Gyakusou running collaboration with the Swoosh. As he does on his thrice-weekly runs, which have expanded in length over the years, Takahashi simply keeps on cruising along—sometimes with others (Nike, Dr. Martens, Uniqlo, Supreme), but mostly alone— happy to chart his own path.

This season, Takahashi’s path took him into new collaborative territory, thanks to an invitation from his friend (and unabashed UNDERCOVER admirer) Pierpaolo Piccioli, Valentino’s creative director. After meeting in Tokyo last year, the pair decided to partner on images that could be shared between their respective Fall 2019 shows. Takahashi was given

“I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HONEST

ABOUT THE CHANGES TAKING

PLACE WITHIN MYSELF. THE COLLECTION

CHALLENGES MY OWN LACK

OF ELEGANCE.”

the task of creating the logos and graphics that would appear in both collections. For the first time, his dark vision would be mirrored on another house’s runway. “Pierpaolo provided the season’s theme and some keywords,” Takahashi explains. “Based on these cues, I interpreted the ideas and designed the images and clothing. Later on, I connected with him to get his opinions and we made adjustments to the designs and direction of the graphics. I am a big fan of his worldview, so I was honored to be a part of it.” The images, predictably, turned out pretty dark and pretty twisted, but were all incredible. Piccioli loved them.

At the Paris men’s shows in January this year, Takahashi’s graphics— the images of Alex DeLarge, Poe, flying saucers, Beethoven, Caravaggio—graced the catwalk at Valentino, where they gave Piccioli’s slouchy, ’80s-era Italian tailoring a sporty, streetwear vibe. Then, a few hours later, at the UNDERCOVER presentation, they reappeared on Takahashi’s contemporary reimaginings of 17th-century, Renaissancestyle silhouettes. When asked to distinguish his design philosophy from Piccioli’s, and also how they complement each other, Takahashi simply says, “I am much darker than he is. In our approach to beauty, he expresses the bright side while I tend to express the darker side of beauty. That, to me, is the biggest difference.”

UNDERCOVER’s muses certainly tend to represent the darker side of humanity. Like Alex DeLarge, or Count Orlok, or even Caravaggio, they’re the sort of characters you might want to avoid in a back alley after midnight. But, as Takahashi says, they’re also beautiful— or relatable, at the very least. Necessary, even. In his eyes, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, light and dark, heroism and villainy aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re simply part of what makes us human.

Takahashi has several tattoos on his arms, maybe the most significant of which are located above an ethnic pattern resembling jagged-edged razor blades. On one arm is the word “chaos” and, on the other, “balance.” Chaos and balance, like its slogan “We make noise, not clothes,” are central, not entirely contradictory, tenets of the UNDERCOVER brand. The words don’t just appear inked on Takahashi’s skin but on the label’s clothing and accessories, resurfacing most recently as graphics for its latest Nike collaboration, a capsule of blacked-out athletic gear and a riff on Nike’s Daybreak running shoe.

The juxtaposition between “chaos” and “balance” is reminiscent of a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), the scene in which Private Joker, a war reporter played by Matthew Modine, catches the attention of a colonel next to a mass grave full of bodies. Private Joker’s wearing a peace symbol button on his uniform, but he’s also got “Born to Kill” scrawled in black marker over his helmet. The colonel demands to know the meaning of this sick joke. “I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir!” Joker barks. Taken aback, the colonel demands clarification. Joker repeats himself: “The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir!”

The “duality of man,” of course, is a recurring theme in Stanley Kubrick’s work, one of a couple of big ideas that tie his films together. It’s also a common thread that runs through many UNDERCOVER collections, one that makes sense of chaos and balance, of order and disorder. Takahashi, not coincidentally, has returned repeatedly to Kubrick for inspiration, especially in recent years. His Spring 2018 ready-to-wear range took the idea of twins and duality as its theme; the inclusion of The Shining’s Grady sisters was a no-brainer. For Fall 2018, he channeled the paranoia of a techcontrolled world with a collection inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, before returning this season with his latest homage to the director. Undercover’s Fall 2019 collection is titled “The Droogs,” after the Nadsat slang term for “friend” in A Clockwork Orange.

Takahashi, characteristically, both acknowledges and downplays Kubrick’s influence on his work. “There are many artists besides Kubrick that I like,” he says. “So I wouldn’t say I’m especially inspired by him more than others. I have always been fascinated by movies that express humanity’s duality, or make me feel anxious. I think that is the reason for my style.” He’s more forthcoming when I bring up Kubrick’s belief that humanity cannot be at peace with itself, cannot move forward if it doesn't recognize the darkness inside us. “I totally agree with him,” Takahashi responds.

When the subject circles back to UNDERCOVER’s Spring 2020 men’s collection, to its necessary darkness, Takahashi points me in his email to the show’s title, which he took from the poet Dylan Thomas: “I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me.” It’s a line that explains the collection’s disparate visual elements, he says—why vampires and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills share the same spaces—but it also hints at something more profound. Sure, there’s evil within us all, and the possibility of insanity. But there are also angels. In this dark, mad, and beautiful world, it seems, there is hope for us yet.