At first glance, it’s a strange statement from someone who has popped up on the runways of, collaborated with, and focused his lens on people who peddle exactly that. There’s recent history. At Undercover’s FW24 show last month, founder Jun Takahashi—who had previously used the score from Wings of Desire, the director’s Berlin-set exploration of life between death, to soundtrack his SS24 show—enlisted Wenders to read a poem he had penned titled “Watching a Working Woman.” As models walked the runway in Takahashi’s takes on the everyday—jeans, vests—Wenders told a story: “40 years old, mother of one, single, working.”Over email, Takahashi wrote, “Since our collection theme was ‘everyday life,’ I requested [Wenders] to create a poem much like Perfect Days, which portrays the ordinary moments of life. I’ve always been a fan of Wim Wenders’s films, such as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, and I’ve watched them repeatedly. Among them, his recent work Perfect Days deeply resonated with me. Having someone like Wenders, who creates such impactful pieces of art, to craft and read a poem for us is truly an honor.” It’s the kind of high praise for Wenders that’s been shared by film critics and scholars for over five decades. Born in Düsseldorf in 1945, he released his first feature, Summer in the City, in 1970. Already, his preoccupations were on display: a drifting, alienated protagonist; beautifully photographed cityscapes; an interest in an idealized, imagined America and its culture. He was part of a generation of filmmakers, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work came to be known as New German Cinema. Seven years after his debut, he made his international breakthrough with The American Friend, an idiosyncratic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, a noir as interested in cinema history as it was in crime and psychology.
“Fashion. I got nothing to do with that.” Words from director Wim Wenders in his 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a meditative study of legendary Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. At first glance, it’s a strange statement from someone who has popped up on the runways of, collaborated with, and focused his lens on people who peddle exactly that. There’s recent history. At Undercover’s FW24 show last month, founder Jun Takahashi—who had previously used the score from Wings of Desire, the director’s Berlin-set exploration of life between death, to soundtrack his SS24 show—enlisted Wenders to read a poem he had penned titled “Watching a Working Woman.” As models walked the runway in Takahashi’s takes on the everyday—jeans, vests—Wenders told a story: “40 years old, mother of one, single, working.” Over email, Takahashi wrote, “Since our collection theme was ‘everyday life,’ I requested [Wenders] to create a poem much like Perfect Days, which portrays the ordinary moments of life. I’ve always been a fan of Wim Wenders’s films, such as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, and I’ve watched them repeatedly. Among them, his recent work Perfect Days deeply resonated with me. Having someone like Wenders, who creates such impactful pieces of art, to craft and read a poem for us is truly an honor.”
It’s the kind of high praise for Wenders that’s been shared by film critics and scholars for over five decades. Born in Düsseldorf in 1945, he released his first feature, Summer in the City, in 1970. Already, his preoccupations were on display: a drifting, alienated protagonist; beautifully photographed cityscapes; an interest in an idealized, imagined America and its culture. He was part of a generation of filmmakers, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work came to be known as New German Cinema. Seven years after his debut, he made his international breakthrough with The American Friend, an idiosyncratic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, a noir as interested in cinema history as it was in crime and psychology.
