Junya Watanabe is Japanese fashion designer, born in 1961 in Fukushima in Japan. He was a student at the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, graduating in 1984. At this time he began his apprenticeship at Comme des Garçons as a patternmaker. In 1987, he was promoted to chief designer of Tricot knitwear line and then moved on to design for the Comme Des Garçons Homme line. Starting in 1992, he has worked under his own name as part of Comme des Garçons. He started his own line under the Comme Des Garçons name called 'Junya Watanabe Comme Des Garçons' in 1993 and began showing in Paris that same year. Watanabe, like his mentor Rei Kawakubo, is renowned for designing innovative and distinctive clothing. He is particularly interested in synthetic and technologically advanced textiles and fabrics but also uses more traditional materials such as cotton. Watanabe is often considered a "techno couture" designer, creating unusually structured clothes out of modern, technical materials.