Excerpt: Junya Watanabe Spring 2025 - Paris Fashion Week

 

"...Watanabe, for his Spring 2025 collection, set forth the runway soundtrack from the late *Donna Summers 1977 hit "I feel Love".  And it is Watanabe's dystopian array, showcasing that tumultuous timeline and collapsed cities, that the 1970s and 1980s were at least honest of the possibility that thermonuclear destruction was nigh.  Far removed from the 21st Century prefabricated whitewash, that all is well as the world swings further to Far Right of politics.   You may ineed ask, how the hell did we get to this?    Well, I blame with a sardonic overture, debt piled mortgages, netflix and mobile phones.  Yes, I am awaiting the return of analog and videotapes.  Aren't you?  

And science fiction is mostly on point within its hit and miss ratio, because what we do not confront and accept, to either change or embrace becomes the hyperreal, and my goodness are we living in hyperreal times.  As even the morbid curiosity seems unreal.  Yet, the reality is that we just came out of a global pandemic, the worst viral outbreak since the Spanish flu of 1918,  straight into genocidal wars, inflation, global and climate upheaval.  Very much like a science fiction script, except denial has been that order of the day.  And, all is well on a mobile phone screen with its 24 hour social media feeds, filled with 'famous for 15 seconds' nobodies piling up ad infinitum.  It's all repetition, before the 11th hour.  Am I too doomsdayish?..."

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Full review:  chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2024/10/junya-watanabe-spring-2025-paris.html

(A.Glass 2024)