Undercover: Jun Takahashi's Seasons from Harajuku to Paris

A punk from Kiryu

Jun Takahashi was born on 21 September 1969 in Kiryu, a city in Gunma Prefecture north of Tokyo. Kiryu is an old weaving town. In the 1980s its fabric mills, sewing workshops and embroidery factories still supplied Tokyo labels, and the Hysteric Glamour founder Nobuhiko Kitamura drove there at night with his patterns. The embroidery workshop he used happened to sit close to Takahashi's home. The same town gave Japan its embroidered souvenir jackets, a story we tell in Kiryu and the sukajan.

Takahashi went to Kiryu Nishi High School. He has said he was deep in punk during those years, and that he began to want to be a designer at about fifteen. His first fashion hero was Vivienne Westwood. In his free time he sang in a cover band called the Tokyo Sex Pistols, with his hair up like a rooster's, and the band gave him the name Jonio. The music mattered: crust punk and hardcore bands such as Discharge, Crass and GISM later fed straight into his clothes.

That is the first thread to hold on to. Undercover is a fashion label made by someone who came to fashion through music, and who still reads clothes the way a fan reads a record sleeve. The punk look of his youth sits at the root of our wider essay on punk romanticism in Japan.

See also: Kiryu and the embroidery towns and Hysteric Glamour and the graphic archive.

Bunka and the first T-shirts

At eighteen Takahashi entered Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo. He has said he went there to learn technique only, because he doubted that older teachers could teach him design. Accounts give 1988 or 1989 for his enrolment, and we set out both in the table near the end. He graduated in 1991.

In 1990, while still a student, he started Undercover with Ichinose Hironori, the designer of a label called Vandalize. The name was coined to give the clothes an air of secrecy. The first pieces were T-shirts printed by hand. One early design set a red-dyed gauze patch, printed with the faces of wanted radicals, into a T-shirt; it was never sold. The Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, which later gave the label its first museum show, dates the start to 1990 as well.

After he graduated the brand grew in earnest, and Japanese punk shops such as Milk Boy began to stock it. Meanwhile Takahashi kept his hand in the scene. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was the front man of a punk covers band, a fashion student, and a printer of his own T-shirts, all at once.

A correction to the common story: Undercover did not begin in 1993. Takahashi started it in 1990, while he was still at Bunka, the date the brand itself marked for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015.

See also: PPFM and the graphic tee and our field guide to Japanese streetwear.

Last Orgy 2 and Nowhere

To see where Undercover came from, start with a magazine column. From 1987 Hiroshi Fujiwara wrote a column called Last Orgy in the street-culture magazine Takarajima, mixing hip-hop, punk, skateboarding and American brands. It shaped a generation of Tokyo teenagers, and one of them, a student named Nigo, moved to Tokyo and enrolled at Bunka. There he met Takahashi, and the two hit it off at once. Our guide to Hiroshi Fujiwara and his circle follows that older line.

In the early 1990s Takahashi and Nigo took over the idea with a column of their own, Last Orgy 2. One account says it began in 1991 under the title AZ before taking its final name. Human Made, the company Nigo later founded, places the column in Takarajima; another account places it in Popeye, and we return to that question below.

In 1993 the two friends opened a shop in Harajuku called Nowhere. The name Last Orgy 2 was also put on a small house brand released now and then in the shop. A company store, Nowhere Ltd., followed in 1995. Nigo went on to found A Bathing Ape, as we tell in our history of A Bathing Ape. The lanes behind Harajuku's main street, where Nowhere stood, became the centre of what Tokyo called Ura-Harajuku. We walk them in our reader's guide to Ura-Harajuku.

The friendship has lasted. In 2021 the column came back as Last Orgy 2.1 in GQ Japan, and on 5 February 2022 Human Made and Undercover released a Last Orgy 2 collection together. A Nowhere-era Last Orgy 2 hooded sweatshirt with A Bathing Ape on our shelves carries that history in one garment.

See also: the street snap from Street to Fruits and how Japanese shops edit culture.

The Tokyo seasons

Undercover became a company in 1994, first as a limited company and from 2000 as a joint-stock company. The public filing of 2026 gives the date of incorporation as 1 September 1994. The brand showed for the first time at Tokyo Fashion Week with the autumn and winter collection for 1994 to 1995.

The shows then stopped for a while. Takahashi came back to the Tokyo calendar with autumn and winter 1997. At the model casting for that show he met Riko Morishita, whom he married in 1999. The same collection won the New Face Prize of the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix. In 2001 he won the grand prize itself.

Every season had a name and an idea. The table gives the main Tokyo seasons as they are usually listed.

Melting Pot is the one most people remember. Takahashi took entirely different cloths and printed them with the same patterns, then painted check patterns on the models' faces. He named it for the idea that we are all human, whatever our race. Our Melting Pot down vest in navy honeycomb nylon dates from that season.

The Exchange idea, clothes that come apart and go back together, has never left the brand. Some of his newest knits still have detachable sleeves and hoods. A pair of Exchange-era slim cargo trousers in stone and navy check shows the period's sharp, narrow line.

These Tokyo years reached abroad faster than the shows did. The designer Kim Jones, later of Dior Homme, remembers packing boxes in a London warehouse in 2001 and seeing Undercover arrive; he thought nothing else looked like it. The broader story of designers who grew from these streets is in our guide to Japanese designer archives.

See also: early and later BAPE and complete coordinates from the 1990s.

A fax, then Scab

Takahashi did not go to Paris easily. He has described an early visit there that went badly, and says he gave up on Paris for a while afterwards. Then Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons came to one of his Tokyo shows. The next day he received a fax from her.

One Japanese account dates her advice to October 2001, after the show for spring and summer 2002. Takahashi has said the fax made up his mind, and that he also felt his work in Tokyo had reached its limit. The wider family of designers who passed through Kawakubo's orbit is in After Kawakubo.

The first Paris show came in October 2002, with the collection for spring and summer 2003. It was called Scab. Takahashi took the idea from crust punk, a branch of hardcore built on animal rights and doing it yourself, whose fans wore ragged, patched clothes that looked elegant to him. The studio stitched together a vast number of small pieces of cloth by hand, and the strips looked like scabs, which gave the collection its name. The cover of the crust band Sedition's Earth Beat record appears across the garments, and a pouch in the collection copies the record's hessian sleeve.

The show ended with a line of models in bright, full-length burqas. It came about a year after 11 September 2001, and those who were there still talk about the shock of it. A teddy bear, the cute Harajuku accessory, had a bolt through its head. Our Scab patchwork trousers with hand-stitched patches show the method up close. The patched cloth links Scab to a much older Japanese practice, set out in the Remake Atlas.

See also: Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons and our Comme des Garçons shelf.

The But Beautiful years

Once in Paris, Takahashi kept a strong run of themed seasons. The table follows them from Scab to the end of what Japanese writers call the But Beautiful period.

The But Beautiful name stuck to the whole era. In 2006 the two words But beautiful were part of the brand's own label. Takahashi explained that in his head there is always something beautiful and something ugly, and that simple beauty does not interest him, but neither does plain ugliness. Our But Beautiful lambskin rider jacket from autumn and winter 2004 and a But Beautiful II reconstructed tartan jacket show the collage at work.

Arts and Crafts is the season leather collectors look for first. Its studded lamb leather blouson with a pile lining belongs with the jackets in our designer leather jackets collection. From the season T, the rock homage, we hold zip cargo trousers with a Klaus print.

The business grew around the shows. An Undercover shop opened in Aoyama, Tokyo, in 2002; Hong Kong followed in January 2006 and Taiwan that May. The architects Klein Dytham designed the Tokyo office, the Undercoverlab, in 2001, and Takahashi called it chaos. The Aoyama windows were blanked out with neatly folded stock, so the shop looked closed from the street. He told the same reporter he would like to make everything by hand. For the Tokyo shops that carried this kind of design, see our Collector's Atlas of Tokyo boutiques.

See also: the Number (N)ine archive and Yohji Yamamoto's archive of imperfection.

Grace, Underman and the return

After the But Beautiful years Takahashi found other ways to show his work. For spring and summer 2009 he paused the runway and made a photo book starring a doll creature called Grace. For spring and summer 2011 he invented a hero of his own, Underman. One season, Avakareta Life, turned his private life into a collection. Our Avakareta Life fishtail parka with a coyote hood carries the name of his running group, Gira, on it.

Then, in February 2013, he came back to the Paris runway with Anatomicouture, for autumn and winter 2013 to 2014. He had been away about two years. He showed in the grand salon of the Sorbonne. Takahashi said the earthquake of 2011 had left Japanese people in a bad state of mind, and that going back to the runway was his way of restoring himself.

The clothes turned the body inside out. Men's white shirts, biker jackets, bustiers and antique brassieres were taken apart and rebuilt by hand to look like skeletons, and rib cages appeared as lace on the backs of shirts. The models wore rabbit masks made by the Tokyo milliner Katsuya Kamo. The same year Takahashi won the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix for the second time.

Three days after the show he ran an eight-kilometre loop of Paris to launch his latest work with Nike. Our Anatomicouture skeleton-bone leather Oxford shoes in cobalt blue come from that return. The dark motifs of these seasons are read more closely in our essay on punk iconography.

See also: Chitose Abe's Sacai and Raf Simons's archive.

Reading the label

For anyone holding an older piece, the label is the first clue. From about 2003 the brand split its names: Undercover on the women's line and Undercoverism on the men's, with the split shown on the tags. A company notice of 2011 still names Undercover as the women's line and Undercoverism as the men's. From spring and summer 2015 both lines carried the single name Undercover, to make overseas trade simpler.

In 2013 the brand started its first second line, John Undercover for men and Sue Undercover for women. John and Sue are simply the names Takahashi imagined for a man and a woman. A design team makes these lines, with Takahashi giving final approval. So the label tells you not only the date but how close the piece sits to his own hand.

Season codes matter as much as the name. Undercover's runway seasons follow the Paris pattern, spring and summer and then autumn and winter, and Japanese collectors often write them in short form, such as 05AW or 03SS.

See also: our guide to designer jackets and the rider jacket.

Working with others

Takahashi has worked with a long line of other companies. Some of the partnerships are serious engineering, some are jokes shared with friends, and a few are love letters to films and bands. The table lists the ones collectors ask about most.

Gyakusou is the deepest of these. The name comes from gyaku, meaning reverse, and sou, meaning run. It refers to Takahashi's Tokyo running group, Team Gira, who ran the parks anticlockwise while everyone else went the other way. The first collection used quiet earth colours instead of the usual neon, with red and blue trims meant to suggest arteries and veins. Our Nike and Undercover quilted down fishtail parka belongs to the later Nike work.

The Uniqlo line was signed on 1 June 2011 and announced that July. UU went on sale on 16 March 2012, the day Uniqlo's global flagship opened in Ginza, in 32 stores in Japan and in 11 markets abroad. Takahashi designed the children's and babies' clothes with his wife Rico. The Uniqlo and Undercover story sits beside other family brands in our essay on play and irony in Harajuku.

The Stranger Things project began because Takahashi was a fan of Eddie Munson, the character who leads the Hellfire Club. The denim and leather jacket and the denim jacket used Levi's denim. Orders were taken only from 19 to 25 November 2022, at the Aoyama shop and online, with delivery from February 2023. We hold the Hellfire Club denim and leather jacket. The longer roll of partners is in Undercover collaborations: the long record.

Leather matters too. Our shelves hold the Lewis Leathers and Undercover Lightning jacket with a chain-link lining. A Champion Reverse Weave zip hoodie shows the lighter side of the work.

See also: atmos and sneaker retail and KAWS and the repeating icon.

The menswear cinema

From the late 2010s Takahashi built many menswear seasons around a single film, record or artist. The Twin Peaks season, for one, used the show's title graphics and stills with official authorisation. The table shows the main ones.

The first of these was shown in January 2018 in Florence, at the Pitti Uomo trade fair, in a joint show with Takahiro Miyashita of The Soloist. The two agreed only the theme, Order and Disorder, and a shared finale, and saw each other's clothes when they arrived. Takahashi said the film was a story about how computers fight humans, and that he had no idea what would happen. Our 2001: A Space Odyssey reversible padded bomber comes from that show.

Twin Peaks shows how much work hides in these seasons. The images were not screen prints but jacquards, woven into the cloth and then patched onto the clothes. A jacket carried a large image of Agent Cooper made from bits of nylon, and the season's title came from one of his lines. Our Twin Peaks wool serge blazer with Agent Cooper patches shows the jacquard close up.

For autumn and winter 2023 Takahashi covered an oversized bomber with more than a hundred patches and asked a poet for the words on the baseball jackets. Ours is the A Wolf Will Never Be a Pet varsity jacket in wool and leather. For spring and summer 2025 he spoke of fictional tribes and of removing borders, and printed linen with clouds and with the house from Hitchcock's Psycho. We hold a Psycho house print linen jacket.

The newest season looks back. For autumn and winter 2026 Takahashi returned to Cindy Sherman, whose film stills he had first used for spring and summer 2020, and turned her self-portraits into elbow patches and prints. Our Cindy Sherman film still lambskin blouson is from that collection. For autumn and winter 2025, the brand's 35th anniversary year, a show titled But Beautiful 4 brought the old name back. Our But Beautiful 4 feather print tailored jacket carries that name.

Behind the scenes of the But Beautiful 4 show in Paris, early 2025, from the official Undercover channel. Look closer: watch the model fittings and the rehearsal on show day, the last steps before the Paris show.
The Tokyo chapter of the same film, made for the brand's 35th anniversary. Look closer: watch for the head props made by hand in the workshop and the design work in Hayama, before the team leaves for Paris.

See also: Japanese bad-boy cinema and street myth and Koenji, punk and patchwork.

The labyrinth

In 2015 Undercover turned twenty-five, and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery gave it a retrospective. It was the brand's first exhibition in an art museum. Labyrinth of Undercover ran from 10 October to 23 December 2015. It showed about a hundred looks from the earliest work to the newest, with show films, dolls and paintings. The title came from the way the many sides of the work tangle together.

The museum years did not stop there. A dress from spring and summer 2024 was later shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. The wider idea of clothes made to question clothes is in Against Clothing. Takahashi's peer at Comme des Garçons is the subject of our Junya Watanabe guide.

See also: Japanese designers to watch and Tadanori Yokoo's posters and paintings.

A new owner in 2026

In 2026 the story came full circle. On 15 June 2026 Human Made, now listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, agreed in principle to buy all the shares of Undercover; the agreement was not binding. The filing gives Takahashi's company address as Jingumae in Shibuya and lists him as holder of 80 percent of the shares. On 11 September 2026 Human Made's board approved the purchase and the contract was signed the same day. Closing is set for February 2027.

Human Made says it wants to grow culture made by human inspiration and craft into a creative industry for Japan, under the motto Cultivate Culture. Takahashi will step back from running the company to concentrate on design. The two firms had already worked together on Human Made and Undercover pieces in 2025. So the friends who opened Nowhere in 1993 will, from 2027, share a company.

For a collector, the archive does not change. The seasons from 1994 to 2026 are what they are, and the labels described above are still the way to read them. Our wider story of the men who built this world is in the anatomy of the Ura-Harajuku drop.

See also: Nigo and Human Made and American vintage in Tokyo.

What Japan holds today

On 31 October 2026 we read the titles of Undercover pieces offered for sale on the largest Japanese online exchange for secondhand goods. We counted words in the titles only and recorded no prices. A search for Undercover in Japanese returned 30,611 titles, and Undercoverism 986. Undercover with Nike returned 881 titles, with riders' jackets 186, and with Uniqlo's UU 161. John Undercover returned 141 and Gyakusou 106. Season names were rare: Arts and Crafts returned 35, Twin Peaks 15, Melting Pot 8 and Scab just 2.

In the first 989 titles under Undercover, 172 named a jacket, 130 trousers or denim and 103 a T-shirt. 107 gave a season code or the word archive, 63 named Nike or Gyakusou, 49 a riders' or leather jacket, 28 the Undercoverism label and 26 the early years or the 1990s. Our reading: the name moves in large numbers, but titles rarely give the season, so identifying it is the collector's job, and the label table above is where to begin.

See also: Harajuku and the invention of youth and Neighborhood, WTAPS and military streetwear.

On our shelves

Our Undercover collection holds the brand's pieces from every decade. The oldest is a wool felt jacket from autumn and winter 1996, the barbed-wire season. From the last Tokyo years we hold a tiger camouflage China jacket with frog closures from spring and summer 2001. A varsity jacket from autumn and winter 2001 with cowhide sleeves and chenille patches sits beside it.

Outerwear is the strongest part of the archive. The jackets sit with other labels in our designer jackets collection. Gyakusou belongs to a wider Japanese habit of building city clothes from technical cloth, set out in our study of Goldwin. Pieces from Nigo's side of the Nowhere story are in our A Bathing Ape collection, and the wider period is in our 2000s Japanese pop culture collection.

Why do so many of these pieces survive in Japan? Tokyo has a long habit of keeping designer clothes in good order and passing them on, which we explain in how Japan became the world's vintage capital. If you want a season or a piece that is not on our shelves, our Private Search service can look for it in Japan.

Where the record differs

The written record of Undercover disagrees in several places. We give each version and say which we follow.

Answered plainly

What is the difference between Undercover and Undercoverism?

From about 2003 to 2014 Undercoverism was the name on the men's line and Undercover on the women's. From spring and summer 2015 both carry the name Undercover.

Which Undercover season is the most famous?

Many collectors name Scab, the first Paris collection, shown in October 2002 for spring and summer 2003, with its hand-stitched patches and burqa finale.

Who is Jonio?

Jonio is Jun Takahashi's nickname, from his years as singer of the Tokyo Sex Pistols.

What is Gyakusou?

Gyakusou is Takahashi's running line with Nike, launched in 2010. The name means running in reverse, after his group's habit of running the parks anticlockwise.

Who owns Undercover now?

Takahashi does, for now. Human Made signed a contract to buy all the shares on 11 September 2026, with closing set for February 2027.

Our reading: a season is a story

Takahashi began with hand-printed T-shirts at Bunka, built a company in Harajuku, went to Paris on Kawakubo's advice and gave almost every season a name, a soundtrack or a film. The label tells you which line a piece belongs to, but only the season tells you what it means, and that will stay true whoever owns the company. That is our reading.

Seen from a distance, Undercover is the new Japonisme in one career: a punk from Kiryu who turned Ura-Harajuku T-shirts into Paris tailoring, with Rei Kawakubo as an early supporter. The whole lineage is in our designers’ bible.

With care from Tokyo,
The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team

Where next

Further reading

  • W. David Marx, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (Basic Books, 2015), for Ura-Harajuku, Nowhere and the Last Orgy columns.
  • System magazine, issue 11, for long interviews with Jun Takahashi, Kim Jones and Nobuhiko Kitamura.
  • The exhibition pages of Labyrinth of Undercover, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2015.
  • The official Undercover film channel, for show and studio films.

References

Zurück zum Blog

Hinterlasse einen Kommentar

Bitte beachte, dass Kommentare vor der Veröffentlichung freigegeben werden müssen.