In the early 2000s, I saw a woman on a street in Milan wearing a skirt I couldn’t explain. Black taffeta, deconstructed, with cutouts and layers that fell in a way that felt slightly wrong but also very right. I didn’t know enough yet to identify what it was. It felt like Comme des Garçons, but not quite.
It haunted me. I asked friends and colleagues, pulled archive references, and looked at old runway photos. The more I looked, the more I learned what I didn’t want—and what I did. Years later, I walked into Linda Dresner and saw a black skirt with the same deconstructed style and it clicked. Junya Watanabe was what I’d been searching for all along. But the years of looking had taught me how to see.
