Eugene Rabkin is an American journalist and the creator of StyleZeitgeist, an online forum dedicated to the discussion of fashion design in its purest forms.

A BLOG is delighted to present Eugene as the first external author, as we showcase his work – thorough yet concise articles which are truly relevant in the world of A MAGAZINE.

His first contribution is an abridged text from his article in Haaretz Magazine on A#4 curator Jun Takahashi, published on 31st July, 2009.

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UNDERCOVER MAN

Cult designer Jun Takahashi wants to make noise, not just clothes

FLORENCE – There is something oddly beautiful about a mutilated teddy bear, at least when the gutting is done by Jun Takahashi, a young Japanese fashion designer whose label, Undercover, has achieved a cult international following. On a balmy Florentine evening in June, Takahashi stood on a platform on top of a hill overlooking the entire city, ripping into the white plush toy with large tailoring scissors. His two assistants fussed around a half-made man-size doll, while a DJ, accompanied by a musician playing a synthesizer paired with a strobe light, spun hard-core industrial music. Live doll-making was part of a show Takahashi put on during Pitti Uomo, the largest international menswear fashion trade fair, which takes place in Florence. Each time, a special guest designer is invited to present his collection. Past guests include Rick Owens and Thom Browne, both designers popular with fashion cognoscenti but hovering just below the radar of the general public. Takahashi now finds himself in the same position.

Before we had to trek uphill to the beautiful Boboli Gardens that hide behind the Pitti Palace, Takahashi showed his new menswear collection. These days he is preoccupied with the relationship between form and function. This manifests most clearly in the use of high-tech fabrics in the past few Undercover collections. For Fall/Winter 2009, Takahashi used fabrics like WINDSTOPPER, a lightweight material that is completely waterproof and breathable, and c_change, which features tiny membranes that open to let body heat escape as it senses your body temperature rise. As soon as the body temperature falls, the membranes close to retain the body heat.

Using these fabrics for fall and winter allowed Takahashi to create extremely lightweight garments that withstand harsh weather conditions. In his idiosyncratic fashion, Takahashi paired these high-tech materials with beautiful knitwear and flawless tailoring. A particular standout article displayed in his Paris showroom was a dark gray wool women’s blazer lined in c_change fabric (complete with a neat thermometer that monitors the wearer’s temperature hidden on the inside of the jacket ). The techno-fabric tantalizingly peaked through at the garment joints, piquing one’s curiosity about what’s inside. This was not your Mom’s ski jacket.

The Spring/Summer 2010 men’s collection, presented in Florence, continued the form and function theme. The collection, called “Less but Better” was based on the work of Dieter Rams, an iconic German consumer products designer. The title was a rough translation of Rams’ design philosophy, “Weniger, aber besser,” relating to a kind of minimalism of design where all superfluous details are eliminated in order to bring out the object’s usability.

Rams is a legend in the design world −his work has greatly influenced Jonathan Ive, the head designer for Apple. Takahashi decided to apply Rams’ design principle to fashion. The high-tech, functional fabrics, including WINDSTOPPER and COOLMAX, worked naturally here. The dominating color was metallic light gray, the color of many Braun products that Rams has been designing since the 1950s. Many of the jackets the models wore had brown leather inserts or leather handles allowing the jackets to be easily carried. This paid homage to the leather handle on the Braun TP1 portable recorder designed by Rams in 1959. Other pieces had dials sewn into them and some of the buttons mimicked the stark orange on/off buttons of Rams’ products. Again, Takahashi incorporated the techno-fabrics in unusual ways: There were knitted pieces in which he wove reflective fibers together with cotton. Seeing the futuristic- looking models in minimalist clothing march around the highly ornamental fountain straight out of the Renaissance felt positively, well, surreal. And surrealism is what Takahashi does best.

Takahashi was born in 1969 in the small town of Kiryu, in the Gunma Prefecture, into a middle-class family. When he was 18, he enrolled in Tokyo’s Bunka Academy to study fashion. He was highly influenced by punk rock by then and formed his own tribute band called the Tokyo Sex Pistols. It was through punk that he first came to fashion. “I was influenced by Vivienne Westwood’s early designs,” says Takahashi, sitting in a dining room at his hotel in Florence. “She showed that punk fashion can be aggressive, but at the same time elegant and sexy; that it’s not just about sticking safety pins into leather jackets and putting holes in your T-shirts.”

Music has always been a binding force for Takahashi. He is friends with Patti Smith, the legendary New York punk rocker and a poet. “I was always impressed not only with her music, but also with her style,” says Takahashi. Yoshie Tominaga, the first Undercover photographer, used to be a photographer for Patti Smith. He introduced Takahashi to Smith through a series of letters that can be seen in “The Shepherd,” which Tominaga authored. Takahashi asked Smith if she could write a poem for his “But Beautiful” collection. She reworked her poem “Neo Boy,” and sent him a recording of it, and he played it during the catwalk show. Takahashi incorporates elements of Smith’s aura in his clothes. Each pair of Undercover pants and jeans has a small lightning bolt stitched below the left knee, a faithful reproduction of her tattoo. For the Spring/Summer 2009 men’s collection, Takahashi stitched out the words from “Neo Boy” onto pants legs and around the front pockets of his jeans.

It is punk rock that Takahashi invariably returns to – he has a fascination with noise. “We Make Noise, not Clothes,” is a slogan that reverberates through each of his collections. Takahashi puts it on T-shirts and on adhesive tape that holds the seams of his techno jackets together. “With that slogan, I wanted to show that Undercover is not about just making clothes, but about showing my world through clothes,” says Takahashi. The clothes, just like the dolls and the books, become a vehicle of expression, not an end in themselves.

Noise featured prominently in the music that served as a backdrop while Takahashi was making his bizarre doll in the Boboli Gardens. The forceful, loud music, his team of grown-up Tokyo street kids, the freakish dolls, and, finally, Takahashi himself seemed decidedly out of place in that fragile, pretty Renaissance garden. They contrasted sharply with the cocktail dresses and high heels of the audience. But the longer they went on with their work, the more Takahashi’s surreal world took over and became reality on that summer night. He made that evening his own. Finally, after about an hour, he was done. The music stopped. The bicycle light in place of an eye lit up. “Arigato!” the audience shouted.

An excerpt from UNDERCOVER MAN By Eugene Rabkin for Haartetz Magazine, 31st July 2009

For full article, click here.