In 1981, when Rei Kawakubo started showing her Comme des Garçons collections in Paris, she already had a loyal Japanese following known as “the crows,” so-called because of the designer’s preference for black, a shade that she would describe as, “comfortable, strong, and expressive.” Kawakubo’s preference for black was one of the first things that critics took note of when she arrived on the international scene; in 1982 Vogue said that Kawakubo, “uses different blacks, their hue changing according to fabric and light.” The same description could have been applied to her Fall 1992 outing, dubbed “Lilith.”
The comedienne Sandra Bernhard walked the show; the pair met when Bernhard went to the brand to be outfitted for an event. “[Rei] put me in a man’s suit; she loved me in a man’s suit better than her women’s clothing,” Bernhard told Vogue. “She’s an artist, she’s political, and she does her own thing. She’s always just marched to the beat of her own drummer in a way that a lot of people can’t do, or don’t want to do, in the fashion world.” (It’s interesting to note that while Kawakubo is known for casting personalities in her men’s shows—Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Rauschenberg walked for her in the 1980s, as Alexander McQueen did in 1997—the designer has usually stuck to professional models for her women’s collections.)
Though predominantly dark, Fall 1992 was not a complete blackout: The models sported some flashes of pink, and strokes and polka dots of white. The cocoon-like finale looks, which required them to walk with their arms crossed, seemed to demonstrate Kawakubo’s preference for the covered-up. “I do not find clothes that reveal the body attractive,” Kawakubo once told Vogue. The magazine deemed the “semi-destroyed” clothes “very sophisticated.”
