The subtly disturbing work of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans was first hung in Jun Takahashi’s gallery for Undercover’s fall 2015 womenswear show: the one with the rictus-grin masks. A year later, Takahashi brought the artist back into his menswear for fall 2016. This season, the triptych was completed with Poisonous Plants, a collection named after the beautiful still lifes of close-to-death botanicals that appeared across its garments.
Details of Borremans portraits were framed by topstitching on the pockets and back of a reversible chore jacket or worked into the fabric of a collarless shirt. A forlorn sprig of magnolia was arranged on the front of a blouson in fawn technical fabric, its back bisected by one of the wavy seams that ran through this collection. It was placed on a mannequin above a pair of matching pleated pants. Sweatshirts, jean pockets, lenient shirts, Vans-collab uppers, military-knit-jacket hybrids and bandanas were amongst the garments further imprinted with the artist’s output.
Elsewhere there were some marvelous core pieces: I loved the ripstop action pants with articulation darts and mismatched twisted seams, as well as the wavy-seamed Type II denim tribute in a heavy woven fabric. There was a great series of bandana-print pieces that eschewed the normal pattern language to insert accents drawn from Roman mythology and Dante’s Inferno: to die for.
