Over time, it has become painfully evident that Junya Watanabe does not like to be interviewed. That’s not a snipe, merely a statement of fact. There is scant information available on his life or first-person explanations of his work, despite last year marking the 30th anniversary of his eponymous brand, and 2023 the same anniversary of his first fashion show in Paris. Interview requests tend to be politely rebuffed by the press office at Comme des Garçons, the company that owns his brand, and even when granted, Watanabe can be outright evasive in his answers. You’ll ask a question and Watanabe will answer it differently to how you might expect, even diffidently, sometimes dissidently. Basically, exactly how he pleases.

Interviewing Watanabe in episodic emails, in the weeks leading up to and immediately after his Spring/Summer 2023 show, which took place on October 1 in Paris, gave our exchange an even stranger cadence. There is, of course, the definite quality inherent to written correspondence, a lack of interpretation or inference, but our back and forth was also subject to translation, of course. My questions became verbose in a vainglorious attempt to round out and encourage longer answers, which perhaps the medium inherently discourages.

Nevertheless, the ongoing correspondence allowed for the possibility of returning to ideas and themes that seem to excite interaction or, doggedly, to try and extract more precise answers from this relentlessly taciturn interviewee. Who doesn’t like a challenge?

To say that Watanabe fiercely guards his privacy is a profound understatement. The vacuum of information around him is ample demonstration of that. It is not the theatrical absence of Martin Margiela, Garbo-esque in its inscrutability, which has by now created a cult of personality as powerful as any around omnipotent designers such as Karl Lagerfeld. The artist is present – you can say hello to Watanabe after a fashion show, although he will not have bowed at its finale – but he absents himself from anything further.

Watanabe’s silence reminds me of times I’ve interviewed artists, many of whom are more willing to write down their thoughts than say them aloud and – like Watanabe – would simply prefer that their work speaks for itself. We often espouse the idea that fashion is and always has been a powerful mode of communication, and with its seductive imagery now harnessed to the egalitarianism of the internet, its messages have become particularly potent. Yet the fashion media too often strong-arms designers not only into speaking about the meaning behind what they create, but also explaining for fear that something might be lost in the translation from image to words. ‘Sometimes, I would like a little more feedback,’ Watanabe told American Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2006. ‘Criticism would be better than silence.’ But how can people critique if they don’t understand? There is also often a fear of misinterpretation of meaning, especially when clothes are abstract and removed from received notions and accepted stereotypes, when they no longer hew close to our preconceptions of how a broad, padded shoulder symbolizes power, a spreading skirt below a wasped waist femininity. Because Junya Watanabe refuses an easy explanation, we are forced to analyse.

I should emphasize that there seems no truculence to Watanabe’s reluctance to speak – he seems genuinely nonplussed as to why people may be curious about his views, his inspirations, his working methodology. Possibly because he doesn’t share that feeling of inquisitiveness. ‘When I buy music,’ Watanabe once told me. ‘I don’t care about where the musician came from or his background or what his intent was. I just listen to the music, and if I like it, I like it.’

Yet people, including myself, are curious – because Junya Watanabe, now aged 61, is one of the great fashion designers of our time. It was recognized early: 21 years ago, the Victoria and Albert Museum featured Junya Watanabe’s work heavily in an exhibition fittingly titled Radical Fashion – because that’s what Watanabe has always made. His radicalism takes on many forms, as his clothes do when they twist around the body in unforeseen and unforgettable shapes that remap the topography of known anatomy. He has also innovated through techniques, basing extraordinary collections around seemingly humdrum techniques like pleating or water-resistant fabrics, which he demonstrated for Spring/Summer 2000 by deluging models with a sudden interlude of inclement weather mid-catwalk, like a pipe had burst overhead, allowing a delighted audience to watch the drops bounce off his clothes.

Sometimes, Watanabe’s clothes are even radical in their banality – in his work, there is often a compelling notion of examining the quotidian and rendering it alien, of radically morphing the acknowledged and understood. Watanabe has reworked wardrobe staples like trench-coats and denim, army fatigues or sailor stripes, down jackets and leather biker jackets. They never become unrecognizable, but they do become other.

Otaku is an interesting Japanese word. Roughly and indirectly translated as ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’, it denotes an obsessive interest in something niche, often applied to fans of anime or manga. In the past, it was used to describe interests so intense it rendered people unable to function in society, but now it has mellowed and come to mean deep passion. There’s a touch of otaku to Watanabe’s work, in his relentless pulling apart of clothes, his investigation of their forms and reconfiguration of both their shapes and meanings. Indeed, so exhaustive have his obsessive examinations of clothing archetypes and construction methods proven that they have become inescapable points of reference for fashion as a whole. If a designer wants to create a biker jacket, they have to examine Watanabe’s versions. The feeling isn’t mutual. ‘I don’t really look at the other designers,’ he says, ‘I don’t really know what they’re doing. I don’t intentionally try to do something different. Instead of trying to create something alternative, it’s really an expression of what I really, really want to create. It may seem alternative to the audience, but for me, it’s my own way, what I really want to show.’

In doing so, Watanabe has somehow managed to transform garments previously considered static – MA-1 bomber jackets, those motorcycle leathers, pleated skirts, white shirts, T-shirts – and in doing so, reinvented many fashion wheels. It is an exceptional achievement. He is one of the rare designers whose clothes confound expectations, whose inspirations can sometimes confuse. Confusion can be good. It means something is new, which is what Watanabe is interested in. ‘I feel that the word “new” is such a hard word to define and to grasp, and understand,’ says Watanabe. ‘I always try to work towards creating something new, achieving something new.’

That notion of the new is a persistent thread running throughout Watanabe’s work, sometimes even woven into it. In 1995, he presented a series of clothes in a stain-proof fabric woven from polyester and steel devised by a manufacturer specialized in fibres used in radar equipment. In 1999, he worked with Japanese textile mill Toray – which invented Ultrasuede in the 1970s – to create a waterproof textile that traps air and pushes water to the surface, rather than repelling liquid with an impermeable coating. It was the fabric he used for that Spring/Summer 2000 collection. His style oscillates, constantly, between the innately accessible and opaquely esoteric. You genuinely never know what you will see each season at a Watanabe show.

Little information about Watanabe’s upbringing is available. The designer himself is as reticent to talk about it – of course – as he is about so much else. He was born in 1961 in the city of Fukushima. You ask about influences in his childhood, about his parents, about how and if fashion registered, and Watanabe pushes back. ‘Nobody had a creative profession in my family,’ he says. Yet his mother had a shop offering made-to-order clothes. In case that sounds too grand, Watanabe clarifies that his mother was a seamstress rather than a designer, selling ready-to-wear that she tailored to fit client’s bodies. First hearing that, I couldn’t help but think of the pinching and folding that so often characterizes her son’s work, his approach so like a dressmaker fitting garments to a body. He doesn’t speak about his father.

In 2016, I travelled to Tokyo to interview Watanabe in person, an exceptional experience. It was in August, the humidity an oppressive 70% or so. I landed as Typhoon Mindulle was coming ashore, buffeting the bamboo that lines sections of the highways leading from Narita Airport to central Tokyo. Taxis there are blocky, vintage models, archaic-looking Toyota Comforts or Nissan Crews; the drivers wear crisp white gloves, the interiors are outfitted with lacy covers to protect their seats like a stereotypical grandmother’s house. All of this seemed quaintly at odds with the avant-garde fashion that has become so synonymous with the country.

The Comme des Garçons companies – including the original label and its menswear line Homme Plus, the Tao line helmed by Tao Kurihara, the label Noir Kei Ninomiya, established in 2012, and of course Watanabe’s men’s and women’s labels – are responsible for much of that repute. They are based in a brick office building in Aoyama, and have been since 1982, the year Kawakubo first gained notoriety and pre-eminence by showing a collection of hole-pocked black clothes in Paris. Her designs, and those by her then romantic partner, Yohji Yamamoto, were dubbed, among other epithets, ‘Hiroshima’s Revenge’ by a casually racist fashion press. It was an attitude based, in part, on a fear of clothes that literally and figuratively clawed at tradition and poked holes in received ideas of dress. Instead of being tailored, clothes were cut flat, seemingly baggy and shapeless but actually focusing on a different relationship between body and cloth. Kawakubo’s early shops even eschewed mirrors in their fitting rooms: she wanted customers to focus on how clothes felt rather than how they looked.

The label’s collections exerted a significant influence upon a young Watanabe. ‘During my studies, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, they were the big names,’ Watanabe says. ‘I studied them, and of course I was influenced by them as well. At the time, I was very influenced by Pierre Cardin, too.’ At that point, Cardin was a fuddy-duddy fashion dictator best known for owning Maxim’s and licensing his name to everything from floor tiles to sardines to orthopaedic mattresses. Yet there’s something of Cardin’s early innovation in Watanabe’s striking, uncompromising shapes, his obsession with geometric forms, his interest in innovative materials, that aforementioned ceaseless search for the new. It was something he found in the work of Issey Miyake, too, whose influence he describes as ‘profound’. Like Cardin, Miyake played with fabric and form, pushing the limits of both.

I had anticipated the Comme des Garçons building would be stark and severe or perhaps slightly chaotic and guerrilla in the vein of the Dover Street Market spaces. In reality, it just looks like some anyplace office building, the architecture of its design studios similar to many others, too. Watanabe has never left this building, professionally speaking. He joined Comme des Garçons in 1984, straight after his graduation from Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion School. He rapidly became head of Comme des Garçons’ Tricot and menswear labels, before the company created a womenswear line especially for him, under his own name, in 1992.

Designing under the same roof, comparisons between Watanabe and Kawakubo are inevitable – and, spanning the entirety of his working life, Comme des Garçons has fundamentally shaped his design ethos. ‘During my studies I would create clothes based on the textbook of how to make a dress, how to make a jacket, step by step,’ he says. ‘Those ideas were completely thrown out the window when I came to the company. You may already know, but when I entered the company, even the street styles and street fashion was completely different from what Rei Kawakubo was creating. That had a great impact on me as well.’

Kawakubo’s early work and its layers and deliberately abstract loose silhouettes challenged conventional Western dress – the kind of garments Watanabe’s mother fitted to the physiques of her Japanese clients. Kawakubo’s recent work has been described by the designer herself as ‘objects for the body’, constructing shapes in cloth that question the permutations and limitations of what we can describe as clothes. Yet, interestingly, Watanabe has in some respects gone in the other direction, with his explorations of staple garments, and embrace of traditions and investigating archetypes. Unlike Kawakubo, he has created collections with fit-and-flare silhouettes reminiscent of Dior’s New Look and homages to Gabrielle Chanel’s Waspy 1960s bouclé tweeds.

As part of my visit to Watanabe, and after much back and forth, I wrangled the opportunity for a walk-through of Watanabe’s ateliers. He wasn’t especially pleased about it, but eventually consented. When I passed through the door into the deserted room, I realized that every single garment, every mood board, every bolt of fabric had been completely covered, with an obstinacy so extraordinary I almost laughed aloud.

Watanabe will explain his clothes in few words – if you’re lucky, there may be a whole sentence, but it’s a rare occurrence. Here are a bunch of his gnomic pronouncements. ‘Geometric sculpture.’ ‘Heavy-duty couture.’ ‘Hyper-construction dress’ (paradoxically, another was labelled ‘Non-constructed’). ‘Sexy by Junya Watanabe.’ A few times he has simply stated there was no theme. It reminded me of something the milliner Stephen Jones once told me about working with Rei Kawakubo. As inspiration for the hats he was to make for her collections, she would him fax ideas, sentences, maybe a drawing if he was lucky. On more than one occasion, he said, she sent the simple statement, ‘I don’t know.’ Kawakubo works the same way with her design staff – and Watanabe began as a pattern-cutter alongside her. To those cutters, she briefs in abstract, invites accidents and interpretation; Watanabe does the same with his staff. ‘“What intrigues you?” is the question I ask the pattern makers,’ says Watanabe. ‘What each individual thinks is interesting – something that’s completely unrelated to the idea of clothing.’

Watanabe no longer cuts his own patterns. ‘While I no longer make patterns myself, the instructions I give to our cutters are based on my knowledge of pattern-making,’ he says. Watanabe’s past is traced in every seam, his knowledge in their placement and intention. They scar jackets with unexpected cuts, complex and intricate, or converge at a waist, suppression and expansion allowing fabric to flow. There is an early Watanabe collection, from 1996, in which the cut of the dresses seemed to carve them away from the body at the back, like aprons worn over trousers. Another collection, two years later, presented clothes sewn from folded panes of fabric, their volume achieved by the insertion of twisting loops of thin metal tubing inside narrow channels that buoyed the clothes out, sometimes helter-skeltering around the outside like abstract jewellery. There’s a more universal past, too, a notion of memory and history built into many of Watanabe’s pieces. A fan of seaming at the waist may recall the pinched-in waists of 18th-century gowns; those metal rings look like 19th-century crinoline hoops.

If Watanabe’s collections perhaps remained in the abstract for the first decade or so, in more recent work, his love of music has been more assertively expressed. You might even hypothesize that when Watanabe creates collections themed around fashion, they seem like work; when they are themed around music, they feel like fun. The most mind-boggling collections he has executed have been obsessive explorations of crafts like pleating or garment typologies; the most enjoyable shows he has staged have seemed like odes to musicians he particularly admires. In March 1996, he showed an Autumn/Winter collection nearly entirely composed of black leather on models with close-cropped hair and tattoos painted down their arms, all set to the screeching guitar riff of Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Other shows have dressed models as avatars of Blondie’s Debbie Harry or in chopped-up band T-shirts patchworked into dresses and coats.

This Spring/Summer 2023 collection was obviously another example. It was held at the Palais de Chaillot, not in the grand chamber sentineled by a panorama of windows overlooking a picture-perfect view of the Eiffel Tower, but in a space used by most designers for their backstage. It was a typically Watanabe touch. The models strode around to live-mixed music, a mash-up of Duran Duran, Cabaret Voltaire and Japan (the band), hairstyles and make-up flashing back to the early 1980s. The audience bounced in their seats, enthused.

If Watanabe talks about the importance of the reconstruction of uniform – and his Spring/Summer 2023 collection alone took in a litany, from city suiting to motorcycle clothing to bourgeois uniforms of prim blouses with lariats of pearls – the garb of youth cults and musical fandom can be seen as another type of unofficial uniform, one equally embedded with meaning in the tiniest gestures. Watanabe’s work has always toyed with those gestures and symbolism, using the implied meaning of certain fabrics, cuts and details to discover a new language of clothes.

The focus here has been womenswear, because while Watanabe has a successful and influential menswear business, which he has shown in Paris since 2002, he says he approaches creating for the two lines differently. ‘For menswear, I take an approach to creating garments that I could have in my wardrobe,’ he writes, in one of our exchanges. ‘For womenswear, I am not creating for someone’s wardrobe; rather I would say it is purely a laboratory of my creation.’

I wanted to return to something Watanabe said, about his fundamental wish in creating clothing: he wants to change people’s lives. This, I suspect, is difficult through fashion, and always has been. Yet what Watanabe has, perhaps, been able to do is shift a mindset. He has altered the way the world – or, at least, some of it – looks at things. He has questioned conventions previously considered immutable, and turned them on their head. He has embraced fashion clichés, exploded them, even destroyed them. That’s his legacy. That’s what is truly new.