UNDERCOVER

Jun Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER embodies the quintessence of Japanese cool, channeling raw-edged rebellion and dramatic high-concept elegance to produce an inimitable vision that fascinates in its dualities. Takahashi founded the label in 1990 as a student at Tokyo's Bunka Academy of Fashion, eschewing the conventional apprenticeship most young Japanese designers are expected to undertake. Such irreverence carried his early punk-inflected work, which quickly found support and mentorship from Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo. Operating under the maxim “We Make Noise Not Clothes,” UNDERCOVER uses an unexpected combination of materials, colors, and cuts to dissolve the binaries between high and low, avant-garde and utilitarian, and macabre and beautiful. With a diverse and alluring oeuvre, UNDERCOVER generates a coherently surrealist universe, one which Takahashi continues to expand upon one collection at a time.