The Villa Bianca building, on a hillside in Harajuku, is the elegant, Bauhaus-influenced headquarters of Jun Takahashi's clothing label, Under Cover. It stands in direct contrast to the ugly box next door; the powerful Renown clothing corporation. And like this juxtaposition of architecture, Under Cover clothes are everything that Renown's are not.

Under Cover clothes are dangerous, untidy, dirty, in-your-face and colorful to extremes. They are clothes that have been created in a tornado's eye--ripped, twisted, torn and spat upon with hurricane ferocity. Often, they are dead-simple. At the Under Cover Fall/Winter show at Shinjuku's Liquid Room last April, models tramped down a red, rubber runway wearing clothes created from rubber and glue in eye-dazzling colors. Meanwhile, a punk band played loud on an enormous video screen made from white leather. "It was not a typical fashion show," says Takahashi. "Many of the press were upset because it was so loud."

At 26-years-old, Takahashi is the youngest of the major Tokyo designers. After graduating from Bunka Fukuso Gakuen (see TJ, 10/95), he immediately began making and selling T-shirts. "I made them out of marker pens, rub-on letters or just by laying a shirt on an ink-smeared screen," says Takahashi. Those first T-shirts, like his present designs, seem to shout the words "anti-aesthetic." Given this love of turning conventions into proud, glittering garbage, it is no coincidence that this talented designer happens to be a Sex Pistol, Blankey Jet City and Nirvana fiend. "I like their intensity," he says with a slight smile.

Takahashi's interests are diverse. "This year, instead of doing a show, I made a book and a video of my Spring/Summer Collection," he says. Takahashi's newest theme is "Horror"--his catalog bulges with models in cyclops masks, spikes protruding from their necks, all adorned in Under Cover creations. His clothes feature skeletons and camouflage patterns in Lego-like, computer-generated textures.

Now in only his third year as an established Tokyo clothes maker, Takahashi has proved himself not only as a designer, but as a designer's designer. His ideas, especially his, "I-can-see-you-from-the-moon" colors of the Liquid Room shows, were reproduced by almost every other designer in the Tokyo Collections of last October/November. His next task will be to prove he can stay creative and not fall prey to fleeting trends and market-driven blandness.

After taking a glance around his studio and spotting a pair of pants with the fly-zipper down to the knees, another pair in orange and light blue, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a big, black crow, we will take this chance to say that Takahashi's bad-boy fashion will always be very, very good.