Watanabe is 55; his company is 24. The day we met, he wore a black Lacoste polo shirt, shorts and horn­-rimmed glasses that gave a decided intellectual slant to his appearance. “Intellectual” is an adjective often used to describe Watanabe’s clothes, usually by journalists. What they mean is that his clothes are complex, complicated to make, sometimes complicated to wear, intriguing and experimental. He often uses one fabric for a collection, his approach almost scientific in the dissection and cataloging of the material’s various forms. His fall collection explored geometric structures rendered in polyurethane bonded with nylon tricot, a material more commonly used for industrial purposes, like car interiors. The folded, pinched and corrugated fabric spiraled around the models’ bodies, abstracting them, an exercise in shape and construction that just happened to become clothing.

Some of it was mad, in the sense of the highly abstract: A dull red geodesic cape peppered with holes like Gruyère cheese could only be dubbed a “garment” because it was fabric that, in that moment, sat on a body. It bore no fastenings, no extraneous details like sleeves or a collar. The mathematical precision of its structure held the same fascination as a complex equation chalked on a board: the observation of another’s processes, all that sculpted, folded fabric, that painstaking technique. Oddly enough, Watanabe counts Pierre Cardin as an early influence, but there’s a similarity in their uncompromising shapes and obsession with geometric forms. There’s something of Issey Miyake, too: Leafing through a magazine and coming across his work made Watanabe follow fashion in the first place. “I was drawn to the fact that designers before Miyake, like Dior and big names, would create clothes that were form­fitting,” he says. “Issey totally changed the idea, completely different, and that impact was profound on me. Of making me want to create something, the idea of clothing much different from previous designers.”