Feb 07
Quote of Note | Junya Watanabe
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Looks from Junya Watanabe’s fall 2011 menswear collection, shown last month in Paris
“I go to see the clothes [I designed] in the shops, and of course they’re not perfect, and I see only the imperfections. But it doesn’t mean it’s a failure—you just think, I wish it could be better than this. Sometimes I cannot achieve what I really want to do in just one collection, so in the following collection I do it again. There are certain things I’ve been working on for three years.”
-Fashion designer Junya Watanabe, whose fall 2011 menswear collection is a stunning mix of collegiate classics, Fair Isle and Aran knits, and buffalo check accents
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“I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense. I mean I love ’60s psychedelic posters, but those were originally inspired by the whole Art Nouveau movement. So it’s important for me when I see something I like to go back and find out where it really came from. That’s also a way of educating myself and understanding what I love.”
“I was legitimately so upset when I saw what had happened to 
“Those things that you hate for so long are insidiously working on you, until one day you can’t resist them anymore. They turn into favorites. It just takes a while to sort out the complications in them. Those artworks that come all ready to love empty out pretty quickly. It’s why outsiders hate the art we love; they haven’t spent time with it. You and I see things again and again whether we want to or not. We seem them in galleries, we seem them in homes, we seem them in art magazines, they come up at auction. Outsiders see it once, or hear about it after it’s been reduced to an insult: ‘It’s a bunch of squiggles that my kid could do.’ I would like to see a kid who could paint a Jackson Pollock. In a half second, any pro could tell the difference. People want to think Pollock’s not struggling, that he’s kidding. He’s not kidding. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.’”
“The lines are blurring now on what makes an animated film. There was a time when all studios wanted to do was make live-action versions of animated cartoons. Now animation is sneaking in through the back door. Avatar is one of the most successful films of all time. It’s not considered animation, but it really is. As much as the actors did perform in it, there were animators keyframing it.”
“I’m particularly proud of [