Comme des Garçons’s Spring ’98 show was presented at the Conciergerie, the medieval castle on Paris’s Île de la Cité where Marie Antoinette was once imprisoned, and it was scheduled back to back with Martin Margiela’s presentation in the hope, said Kawakubo, “that our belief in the importance of creation will be more strongly felt due to the impact of the simultaneous expression of our similar values.”
Both leading deconstructivists, the designers took radically different approaches to the season. Margiela showed clothes that were totally flat, presenting them on hangers carried by lab coat–wearing men. Kawakubo’s “Clustering Beauty” collection, in contrast, featured lushly romantic clothes with vintage touches seemingly borrowed from children’s and bridalwear. The show contained many Kawakubo-isms, including heavy cartridge pleats on barrel-like dresses and tulle-stuffed bell skirts, and was accessorized with veils, booties, and bunched stockings that were reportedly 6 feet long. “There is beauty in the unfinished,” Kawakubo said. “The very fact of something being unfinished gives it more a feeling of something projecting ahead into the future.” Think of it as Y2K the Rei way.
