This was a menswear follow up to Jun Takahashi’s fall 2025 womenswear adaptation of his fall 2004 collection “But Beautiful.” It’s an old favorite he decided to return to with a fresh eye as a way of marking Undercover’s 35th anniversary. Just like those previous collections, this one’s central thesis was to create clothes for humans in the same style as clothes created for a child’s plush toy, inspired by the French artist Anne-Valérie Dupond.

Even with the sound turned down, music always soundtracks Takahashi’s fashion melodics, and here again Patti Smith, the muse of that original 2004 collection, was brought on stage. Lyrics from “People Have The Power” were printed down the meanderingly distorted hems on jeans and embroidered into other corners of the collection. The other artist collaborator to this collection was a new addition to the “But Beautiful” line-up: the London-based Welsh artist Emma Bennett whose out-of-time and darkly resonant still lives were printed on lightly quilted suiting, jackets, shorts and more.

All of this material was deployed in a collection whose semantic distortions played alongside Smith’s lyrics to invite the wearer and watcher to reshape their outlook. Mismatched buttons, those meandering seams and zippers, exposed pocket silesia and clothing labels attached on the ‘outside’ of the garments were all consistent with the plush toy program inspired by Dupond; attractive abnormalities in clothing. These were extended to collaborations with Champion, Dickies, and Vans, in which all those brands’ archetype pieces were given the same distorted remix applied to the in-house collection.

The red coat in look 1 was a “But Beautiful” intro recap carried from look 9 of last season’s womenswear show. This collection was presented in the showroom, where a charmingly enthusiastic young model raved about the comfort of the round-toed work boots he had been employed to stand in for six hours. Other insights on the ground included the interesting tactile crispiness of the paper yarn that Takahashi blended with cotton for some of his painstakingly cut, irregularly striped boat neck Gainsbourg shirts. The simple act of making the twin breast pockets of a Dickies work shirt was straightforwardly startling. And the pieces in this season’s “the Shepherd” sub-brand Undercover capsule were particularly handsome and, to this old geezer’s eye, also subtly tilted towards Undercover lovers hailing from a Gen more X than Z. No buts: it was beautiful.