Arts and Crafts

“Arts and Crafts” — Undercover’s Autumn/Winter 2005-06 collection — sits at the culmination of what archive collectors and fashion historians recognize as Jun Takahashi’s golden age, the sustained run of creative intensity that began with “Scab” in Spring/Summer 2003, continued through “But Beautiful” in Autumn/Winter 2004, and reached its technical apex here before the equally celebrated “T” of Spring/Summer 2006. The title was not a reference to William Morris’s nineteenth-century movement but to the literal acts of making and repairing that constituted the collection’s methodology: sashiko stitching, patchwork assembly, laser-cutting, distressing, dyeing — a vocabulary of handcraft applied to garments that appeared to have lived several lives before arriving on the runway.

The collection’s defining piece was the 85 Denim — named after its retail price of eighty-five thousand yen — a pair of jeans so dense with detail that it functioned less as a garment and more as an autobiography of repair. The slim straight cut was overlaid with extensive sashiko stitching, the Japanese mending technique that transforms damage into decoration by filling a tear with running stitches that are themselves a form of embroidery. Hearts in patchwork appeared on the left leg. Patti Smith’s lightning bolt motif was embroidered at the knee — a signal to the punk and poetry audience that Takahashi has always addressed. Boro details appeared on the back pockets. Metallic hardware along the waistband was etched with skull and crossbones, and the overall effect was of denim that had been worn, destroyed, repaired, worn again, and repaired again until the repairs themselves became the garment’s primary visual content. Available in blue and a rare all-black version, the 85 Denim is renowned as the most expensive Undercover item publicly sold and one of the most sought-after pieces in Japanese denim collecting — not because of its price but because it represents Takahashi’s conviction that the history embedded in a garment, whether real or fabricated, is more valuable than its materials.

The laser-cut skull blazer was the collection’s other landmark: a long charcoal overcoat in paneled wool felt whose back was meticulously cut with skull-and-crossbones motifs, each skull fastened by metal hinges that allowed it to rotate, creating a garment that moved and shifted as the wearer walked. The technique — laser precision applied to a punk motif, industrial technology in service of subcultural iconography — captured exactly the tension that made Takahashi’s work irreplaceable. Critics specifically admired the overcoat’s “haunting laser-cut detailing,” and it remains one of the most characteristic pieces from one of Undercover’s most celebrated seasons.

The broader collection extended this logic of craft-as-punk across outerwear, corduroys, lambskin, and distressed knitwear. Studded pieces referenced the hardware of London punk while the sashiko and patchwork techniques grounded the work in the Japanese mending traditions that treat repair not as a concession to damage but as an improvement upon the original — the philosophical position that a broken thing, properly mended, is more beautiful than an unbroken thing ever was. The collection effused what one critic described as “gothic, archaic and intricate feelings,” and the garments occupied a space that no other designer was working in: too crafted to be punk, too damaged to be luxury, too Japanese to be Western, too Western to be traditional Japanese craft. “Arts and Crafts” proved that Takahashi’s Paris debut had not been a one-season phenomenon but the beginning of a sustained investigation into what happens when you take clothing apart and put it back together with more care than it was originally assembled with — when destruction and repair become the same gesture.