Excerpt: Junya Watanabe Spring 2025 - Paris Fashion Week

 

"...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?

Watanabe doesn't think so, drawing from, at least aesthetically, the 2014 dystopian Artificial Intelligence inspired movie 'Ex-Machina', of what it is to be human.  And in a postmodern prose; could we relate to AI as a human?  And vice versa.  With the ultimate question being asked.  Will AI save us from ourselves or destroy us?  Whatever the questions one may ponder, it is Watanabe's late 1970s esque sci-fi template which offers that just right amount of hedonistic sexual tension.  It is sex and doomsday.  With 31 styles on display, from dystopic clad metallic looks, through to its urban goth styles towards the end of the showing.  So, envision walking through service alleyways in-between prefabricated buildings of glass and steel, surveying the pieces of cladding that has fallen of from their façade.  And your mobile phone doesn't work, and the digital networks are down.  Sans a handheld pager, and your MiniDisc music player.

The Future is now."

___

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

(A.Glass 2024)