POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Outfit by Jun Takahashi

Object No. 2005/112/1

For his spring 2005 collection, Jun Takahashi paid homage to Czech visual artist Jan Svankmajer and his film Alice (1987), an eerie, surreal interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In Svankmajer's film, Alice inhabits a nightmarish world of rotting furniture, stuffed animal corpses, and malevolent antique dolls. Taking his cue from the film's decaying domestic environment, Takahashi created Edwardian style dresses in lace, silk and tulle layered and meticulously ripped and sewn and then cut to appear cracked and rotting with details such as embroidered trims that look like teeth and buttons shaped like eyeballs. Some garments appeared to be devouring other garments while in others the wearer's intestines appear to be spilling out. The detail, layering, and eclectic use of colour and pattern are characteristic of Takahashi who says that his signature designs lie between high fashion and street wear. While still at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, Jun Takahashi (born 1969, Kiryu prefecture) launched his T shirt label Nowhere, together with a friend Nigo who later went on to develop the cult Japanese street wear label A Bathing Ape. After graduation, Takahashi had a brief career as a singer in the punk band Tokyo Sex Pistols, before creating his highly successful Undercover company in 1994. His label is a cult label of "ura Harajuku" (the back streets of Harajyuku, Tokyo, the centre of Japanese subcultural fashion) In 2001 he won the Mainichi prize, Japan's most prestigious fashion award, and under the aegis of Rei Kawakubo debuted in Paris in 2002.