![]() ![]() Archer is an avid Undercover fan himself: “I got so excited finally being able to experience the store. “When I first went to Tokyo, one of the stores at the top of my list was the MADSTORE at Laforet in Harajuku,” says Mr George Archer, Senior Buyer for MR PORTER. In a first for the brand, MADSTORE merch is now available on MR PORTER as part of our new Super Mart collection, which means you no longer need to hop on a flight to Haneda airport to get your hands on it. ![]() ![]() “ expressing Undercover’s dark pop world through products that were more casual-minded, that are then able to reach more people,” Takahashi says. They exist apart from regular fashion seasons, providing a recognisable and, crucially, accessible entry-point to the in-demand brand. The items stocked there, iconic collectables such as the MediCom Gilapple lamps and clocks (in the rather convincing shape of a real apple, crafted from glossy PVC), take cues from Undercover’s rich archive. Conceived as a shop within a shop – it is housed within the Parco department store in Shibuya – stepping into the store feels a bit like entering Takahashi’s own private dream landscape. Originally opening in Tokyo in 2013 as a concept shop specialising in exclusive items, MADSTORE quickly gained fans overseas. “From there, I’ll go deep into that theme, and expand out the worldview and story of the idea in what I design.” “I start off by finding something that feels fresh and exciting to me, and then centring the idea for a collection around that,” he says of his creative process. Collections for Undercover have drawn on everything from prints of the 1922 film Nosferatu, to Ms Cindy Sherman’s photography, to Neon Genesis Evangelion, for which he most recently made padded jackets and light-up hoods inspired by the anime’s cyborg mecha suits. Riffing off an otaku-like obsession with pop culture in his work, Takahashi is a cultural kleptomaniac, taking a theme for each collection and running with it. Speaking to MR PORTER over email, the man behind the Tokyo-based brand Undercover is that increasingly rare example of a fashion designer who, decades into his career, is still working – successfully, no less – under his own name. Suzy Menkes is a British journalist and fashion critic.“I apologise if this comes across as egotistical, but I have never once tried to meet the expectations or requests of other people,” says Mr Jun Takahashi. Jun Takahashi is the founder of UNDERCOVER, a label he started in 1990. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 photographs and in-depth essays by fashion writers, curators, and colleagues, this book gives readers first time access into Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER, one of the most desired and multidimensional clothing lines in contemporary fashion. The violent rending and hasty reassembly that characterized his early work, its calculated imperfections and sutured seams, have given way to collections that he himself now calls "sexy and feminine." UNDERCOVER is insightfully curated with fashion-filled chapters devoted to Takahashi’s sketches, graphic work, collaborations, and most innovative designs to date. But Takahashi would blaze an entirely different path to legend and notoriety. Hailing from Gunma Prefecture like his friend NIGO® of *A Bathing Ape®, Takahashi’s long association with the undisputed king of Ura-Harajuku in the early 1990s is now the stuff of local fashion lore. A fixture of the Paris collections for more than ten years-plus seventeen uninterrupted seasons in Tokyo prior to that-Takahashi’s life’s work confirms a maturation from self-conscious artifice and rebel pastiche to a steely, withering elegance all his own. While not quite populist, his generative influences are instead romantic-even gothic. Takahashi Jun’s fashion is not born out of an excessively intellectualized agenda. The first comprehensive book on the work of Jun Takahashi of UNDERCOVER, an icon of Harajuku streetwear and the presumptive heir to the heavy mantle of Japanese deconstruction. Undercover Author Jun Takahashi, Foreword by Suzy Menkes
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