What do 19th-century style uniforms, top hats, wool workwear, and California surf streetwear have in common?  Answer: Junya Watanabe.

At Fall/Winter 2026 runway during Paris Fashion Week, Watanabe returned to fin-de-siècle silhouettes and industrial-era workwear, a familiar move for the designer’s menswear collections, before rerouting them through the lens of 20th-century subculture.

Which makes the return of Stüssy to Watanabe’s seemingly never-ending collaborative roster all the more surprising.

The streetwear brand and Watanabe are following up on a collaboration debuted in 2024 with a grommetted hoodie (which piqued the interest of one Timothée Chalamet) but go bigger for their second partnership, extending the vibes to a pair of khakis and club blazer. The look would fit quite neatly within the Stüssy universe but styled within Watanabe's remixed heritage vision of menswear, it takes on new merit.

Getty Images / estrop

The pants are reminiscent of preppy Go To Hell pants, all-over embroidered slacks that represented a loosening of the era's traditional menswear mores, which pairs neatly with the club blazer, a very ivy jacket utilized to symbolize entry into an exclusive group or team.

Thus, the look is a comparatively casual answer to the 19th-century garb around it, demonstrating the breadth of Watanabe's 20th-century influences. Under Watanabe’s eye, Stüssy’s typically chill aesthetic is rendered gently formal.

This comes at a time where Stüssy continues to ride a strong cultural streak that ranges from similarly prep-ish partnerships with Wales Bonner to sneakerized work boots designed with Nike.

But if Stüssy is a serial collaborator then Watanabe is the king of collabs, as his runway show was also marked by team-ups with familiar friends Levi’s and New Balance (and those are just the obvious ones). This is Watanabe's approach to system-building, embedding heritage friends into his historically inclined collection to reflect a notion of worldliness borrowed from more established names.

Watanabe absorbs these brands into his ecosystem, operating on them on his own terms. As such, Stüssy’s inclusion here is unexpected, playful, and, at the end of the day, distinctly Watanabe.

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