Athletic Basics Reanimated Like Patchwork Jeans
Junya Watanabe brings the avant-garde fabric logic, Reigning Champ brings clean-lined athleticism. The result? Hoodies and sweatpants that feel more like patchworked punk attire than gym gear.
This Spring/Summer 2025 collaboration riffs on Watanabe’s signature layered, frayed, and asymmetric techniques, most famously utilized for his patchwork jeans. You'll find tartan, red corduroy, black denim, and sashiko-inspired contrast stitching all sewn into Reigning Champ’s midweight terry sweats.
The patchwork feels both meticulous and unfiltered, like something cut and assembled by hand in Watanabe’s Tokyo atelier, and that’s because it was.
Call it loungewear with lore. Each piece is produced in small batches and cut to Watanabe’s Japanese sizing specs.
The pants focus their patching at the knees, while the hoodies let the appliqués sprawl across the torso. A quiet upgrade that turns comfort staples into cult objects.
For Reigning Champ, the collab injects some edge into their premium sweats portfolio. For Watanabe MAN, it’s another exercise in reanimation, reshaping the familiar without losing the weird. He’s done it with Levi’s, New Balance, Carhartt, and The North Face, not just tagging, but deconstructing and rebuilding each one through his obsessive lens.
Now, he’s turned his eye to athletic basics. And you get to be the runway to your gym. The Junya Watanabe MAN x Reigning Champ collaboration is available now via Reigning Champ's website.
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