UNDERCOVER

Founded in Tokyo in 1990 by Jun Takahashi (b. 1969, Kiryū) while still a student at Bunka Fashion College. Takahashi came to clothing through punk rather than couture: he fronted the band Tokyo Sex Pistols under the name Jonio, took Hiroshi Fujiwara as an early mentor, and in 1993 opened the Harajuku store Nowhere with Nigo, a shop whose scarce, irregular releases effectively invented the drop model. His clothes carry a doubled quality that runs through everything he makes, at once beautiful and unsettling, built on graphic precision, narrative collections, and Japanese construction applied to punk material. Colette invited him to present the 1998 collection Exchange in Paris, and Rei Kawakubo later persuaded him to show there properly: UNDERCOVER debuted at Paris Fashion Week in October 2002. The house motto has held since the beginning: we make noise, not clothes.

The brand works across distinct lines: UNDERCOVER (1990, mainline), UNDERCOVERISM (mainline menswear with its own tag until 2015, when both genders were unified under UNDERCOVER; revived as an autonomous sub-label with the FW2021 collection Neoboy), Nike x UNDERCOVER GYAKUSOU (2010, running and activewear with Nike), Uniqlo UU (2011), JohnUNDERCOVER (2013, menswear diffusion), SueUNDERCOVER (2013, womenswear diffusion), The Shepherd UNDERCOVER (2016, built on the premise of the clothes Takahashi wants to wear now; the first season was modelled by Thom Yorke, Hiroshi Fujiwara, and Takahashi himself), MADSTORE UNDERCOVER (retail, merchandise, and basics).