What Would Happen to Those Animals if It Were Junker's Arc
A raccoon skull as a hair accessory at the Junker show.
The presence of skins, furs, feathers and bones of dead creatures is a given with Jünker, but this season the designs shown by Giuliana Mayo and Tod Waters on Oct. 22 had a higher quotient of animal carcasses than usual.
While Mayo rattled off a list of animal skins that made up their fabrications repertoire—deer, snake, coyote, raccoon, artic fox, wild turkey wings and pheasant feathers—Waters put it shortly, “Anything that fit on the arc, we found a way to skin it and use it.”
Mayo added that it was part of a '70s rock and decadence theme. “Because of the recession, we thought we’d just go all over the top,” she said. The event at Velvet Grip Family Tattoo Studio in West Hollywood, Calif., was two-fold, hosting a presentation of Jünker's latest collection and the opening-night party for a month-long exhibition of Los Angeles artists on display at the tattoo studio. If it weren’t for the plumage headdresses, some of models in Jünker’s designs would have been indistinguishable from the party crowd where the status quo dress code was a checklist of tattooed sleeves, piercings and skin-baring rocker clothing that showed off said tattoos and piercings.
Most of Jünker’s clothing that has been skinned, shredded, ripped apart, put back together and then distressed some more in a post-apocalyptic world is hard-edged, but Mayo and Waters find beauty and humor in little details. Along the seams of a plum corset halter top are delicate rows of hand-sewn iridescent natural pearls. The lining on the inside of a tough men’s leather jacket is made of vintage Star Wars bed sheets. Their hunter-gatherer approach for raw materials applies even when the origin material wasn’t shorn from a living thing. When describing the pattern pieces of a denim jacket that is made from a pair of jeans that were totally deconstructed, Mayo said, “So it’s like you use every part of the buffalo.”
Not so tough-looking now eh? The inside lining of a Jünker jacket is made from vintage Star Wars bedsheets.
Designers Giuliana Mayo and Tod Waters, center.
