Undercover Fall/Winter 2019 - The Droog

Jun Takahashi showed Undercover’s Fall/Winter 2019 menswear at the Salle Wagram in Paris on January 16, 2019. The collection was titled “The Droog,” after the gang in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (Fashion Press). Tim Blanks at The Business of Fashion wrote that Takahashi saw the film as a child and found it shocking but sexy, and that he has always been drawn to gangs. A single laser beam opened the show. Then figures in shocking pink, blue and yellow-green robes walked out with feathered hats, beaked Venetian masks and canes (Fashion Press; WWD). Blanks read them as Caravaggio-inspired Renaissance figures crossed with Droogs, a “dream hybrid” that was “apocalyptic and alluring.”

Film stills and the face of Beethoven, Alex’s favorite composer, covered parkas, puffers and coach jackets, and the knits spelled out Nadsat slang. The same day, Pierpaolo Piccioli showed a Valentino collaboration built on Takahashi’s collage of Edgar Allan Poe and UFOs. Undercover’s sportier versions carried a giant V (Blanks, BoF; WWD). WWD called it a “madcap fantasy world.”

To me, it’s villainous. These are the middle-management bosses, the annoying schemers and elusive shadows who work as spymasters, collecting secrets and stacking the deck against their opps through intrigue and manipulation. There’s a smugness to every look, and these are the people whose demise we cheer. It’s power projection by megalomaniacs who still look silly; the emperor has no clothes. There’s nepo baby energy too: "My dad is the local lord, so do as I say. It’s the wimpy, bratty weakling who would execute a peasant farmer because his milk is too sour." It’s A Clockwork Orange, but these are also the clothes of someone like Redmond Barry from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, “a roguish Irish opportunist” who is “mostly driven by self-interest” (Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com).

So what makes someone dangerous? Complete control, or the lack of it? What are we beholden to? What keeps our impulses from pulsating? Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free,” so your enemy won’t be driven to fight to the death. I’ve always thought of violence as a living, malevolent force that we have to counteract with the utmost efficiency to resist its temptations. We need to find hygienic ways to exercise the violence out of us and use that energy for good. The fog of war can be more claraboyant than anything.

It’s worth rewatching the film with that in mind, because it’s a prime example of point of view and an unreliable narrator. Alex narrates the whole story (AFI). Watch how his violence is played as good fun, while violence against him is played as a grave violation. The home invasion becomes a song and dance to “Singin’ in the Rain.” His threesome with two young women from the record shop is sped up to the William Tell Overture, which David Salazar at OperaWire notes makes it comical. In the novel, they’re ten-year-old girls (Encyclopedia.com); Kubrick cast young women (AFI). Meanwhile, the scenes where Alex is the one being hurt, beaten by the police or strapped in for his re-education, are drawn out to make us sympathize with him. The scene I cite most is the one where the police are interrogating him and the one officer spits on Alex, and the spit gets on his lip. This, in my eyes, is Alex's interpretation of the kind of sexual violence and violation he inflicted on others. Roger Ebert caught it in 1972, writing that Kubrick nudges us “toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.” And of course, Takahashi’s show ends with the aforementioned song. DEVIOUS!