Jun Takahashi

Jun Takahashi is a Japanese fashion designer and artist, born in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, on 21 September 1969. He entered Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo in April 1988 and graduated from its Apparel Design Department in March 1991. During this period he absorbed punk through music, nightlife and clothing, performed as the vocalist of the Tokyo Sex Pistols and began UNDERCOVER in 1990 with classmate Hironori Ichinose. The label started with hand-printed graphic T-shirts and direct sales before developing into a full collection practice. Takahashi later opened NOWHERE with NIGO in Harajuku in 1993, giving UNDERCOVER a fixed place within the emerging Ura-Harajuku scene.

UNDERCOVER entered the Tokyo Collection with Autumn/Winter 1994–95 and moved its principal presentation platform to Paris in October 2002 with Spring/Summer 2003 SCAB. Takahashi has remained the defining author of the house across womenswear, menswear and a changing group of named lines. His parallel projects include the Nike running collaboration GYAKUSOU, UNIQLO × UNDERCOVER and its UU family collections, the Shepherd UNDERCOVER and UNDERCOVER PRODUCTION. The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode identifies him as UNDERCOVER’s Artistic Director, and current corporate disclosure identifies him as Representative Director of UNDERCOVER CO., LTD.

His practice also extends into image-making, music, film and fine art. UNDERCOVER’s collections have repeatedly involved photographers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists, while Takahashi has directed imagery and animation himself. He began painting in 2013 and presented his first public solo exhibition of oil portraits and sculptural work, THEY CAN SEE MORE THAN YOU CAN SEE, at Gallery Target in Tokyo in 2023. These activities belong to the same long career in which clothing, graphics, characters, sound and staged images are developed as connected forms of authorship.

Takahashi works by altering familiar clothing until its emotional register changes. T-shirts, military garments, tailoring, knitwear and sportswear are cut, patched, wrapped, interlocked, layered or rebuilt through visible construction. His long-used idea of “Chaos and Balance” describes the discipline behind these changes. Precision and abrasion can occupy the same garment, and a recognisable wardrobe form can carry punk damage, delicate craft, technical fabric or an unexpectedly tender image without losing its practical identity.

Collection titles often establish a working proposition that guides construction, casting and image. EXCHANGE developed modular and interchangeable parts. SCAB used dense hand-stitched fragments and frayed surfaces. The BUT BEAUTIFUL collections explored beauty through distortion, stuffed forms and later revisitations of Takahashi’s own archive. Characters such as GRACE, film references, invented bands, painting, photography and specially produced soundtracks allow the clothes to operate inside a broader fictional world. The runway is one available medium among several, and Takahashi has repeatedly used exhibitions, photographs, showroom formats, digital objects and film when those formats suit the work.

His collaborations show how this language changes under different constraints. GYAKUSOU translates his own long-distance running practice into technical layering, movement and product detail. UU and GU bring colour, graphics and everyday wardrobe thinking to large-scale retail. UNDERCOVER PRODUCTION extends the image-making side of the studio into advertising and moving image. His painting follows a comparable attraction to imperfect beauty, obscured identity and familiar cultural figures transformed through small acts of disruption.