Junya Wantanabe 2010 Spring/Summer Collection

For Spring/summer 2010, Wantanabe's collection was wholly about menswear for women—tailored jacket, slim pants, and shirting explored in a rigorous way that deftly sidestepped the image of the powersuit.
With towering head wraps and flat pointy lace-up oxfords, the collection started out with a midnight blue jacket and narrow trousers in silk and proceeded through dozens of variations in menswear checks with the obsessive logic only Watanabe brings to every collection.
Moving on to pristine white shirtdresses over black leggings, a welcome dose of femininity via drapery was added to the mix, eventually transposing the black-and-white graphics of checks into a riff on geometrics, including a couple of brilliant shirred, checkered synthetic tissue body pieces with a frill in the hem. The genius of the collection was that, for all of the hip experimentation, it was fully tooled as pragmatic daywear—avant-garde, but completely utilitarian.