Fans of Junya Watanabe must have had quick visions of the designer's Spring/Summer 2009 womenswear collection upon seeing the Dutch wax fabric sacks on a wooden boat in the hall of Paris' Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (History of Immigration Museum), the venue for Watanabe's S/S 2016 menswear collection. The womenswear designs Watanabe created in 2009 included indeed complex dresses in boldly coloured Ducth wax fabrics.
For his Spring/Summer 2016 collection, Watanabe returned once again to fabrics by Vlisco, the historical Dutch textile company established in 1846, that first imported batik textiles in Africa, starting a trend for intricate patterns in bold colours.
Patchworks of Dutch wax fabrics decorated linen blazers, shirts and ponchos; they were turned into squares, rectangles or circles and appliqued on Bermudas and denim trousers, or they were used as scarves on ensembles worthy of a flamboyant explorer.
At times it looked as if Watanabe was intrigued by the currently trendy colour-in books for grown-ups, but, rather than using pens and pencils, he decided to employ fabrics and colour-in bits and pieces of his designs by stitching onto them textiles in bright printed motifs.
Though the theme of the collection was a generic "Faraway", the bone, rope, and beaded necklaces, the fetish objects dangling from the neck of the models or the headdresses, spears and shields carried by some of them, clearly pointed towards Africa (the designer spotted the pieces in Paris-based stores that specialise in African artifacts).
The final effect was actually rather uncanny: the models in double-breasted navy plaid suits matched with beaded necklaces or donning panama hats, bow ties, and sockless shoes (mainly brogues) may have been young dandy artists travelling in Africa or maybe they were hipsters with Fitzcarraldo's deranged passion for opera and his colonialist vision in mind.
Watanabe committed indeed a terrible faux pas by choosing to cast only white models in the show, so that the final impression was that of seeing walking along the runway a dandified version of Kurtz (if that was ever possible...) out of Heart of Darkness.
If the designer was indeed trying to turn this fashion collection into a fetishist spectacle or a comment about immigration or maybe tackle the link between initiation and fertilisation rituals, or if he was trying to reference T.S Eliot's Hollow Men, it simply didn't work and the message got lost.
This is actually a shame as Watanabe's clever exercises in textiles could have helped introducing "Afropolitan" or "Afro-urban" themes into the fashion discussion, while in this way, the collection risked of getting trapped and filed under the "cultural appropriation" label.
In February this year the London-based William Morris Gallery collaborated with Yinka Shonibare MBE. The British Nigerian artist interested in tackling themes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, imperialism, the impact of immigration on British culture, and the global textile trade through his work, recreated three photographs from the Morris family album. Some of the sitters donned for the occasion Victorian costumes, refashioned from Vlisco's Dutch wax fabrics created especially for the project.
The work, on display until early June, encouraged visitors to reflect on Morris's political views by connecting his socialist ideals with the history of the British Empire.
Like Shonibare's work, this collection could have been a celebration of textiles and diversity in a modern perspective or it could have been used to comment upon the current immigration issues and laws in European countries, while considering the notions of territory, place, cultural identity, displacement and refuge.
The way it was presented brought instead to mind and on the runway ideas of white supremacy and colonialism, trade and race, cultural appropriation and globalisation, and that was a shame as the venue where the show took place launched quite a few exhibitions about the role played by immigrants in the economical development, social evolution, and cultural activities of France, while looking at sensitive issues such as xenophobia and hostility.
This was therefore one of those occasions in which the casting damaged the mood and meaning of the collection and this was rather disappointing also considering that Watanabe is part of a current exhibition entitled "Fashion Mix - Mode d’Ici, Créateurs d’Ailleurs" (Fashion Mix - Fashion from Here, Designers from elsewhere) at the Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, that features non-French designers who worked in France or showcased in Paris, enriching the local traditions or radically revolutionising them in a creative melting pot.
Image credits for this post
Image 8 in this post: Yinka Shonibare MBE, "The William Morris Family Album", 2015; Copyright the artist, Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, Commissioned by William Morris Gallery.
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