Evolution is the name of the game chez Comme des Garçons. “Everything is step-by-step,” Rei Kawakubo once told André Leon Talley. “Ten years ago, 10 years later—it’s all the same to me.” While the designer doesn’t repeat herself, she does revisit concepts. A sub-theme of Kawakubo’s Spring 2001 show, which included pieces made of fetish-y transparent plastic, was the peekaboo game of reveal/conceal. She doubled down on that idea in her Fall 2001 Beyond Taboo collection, which tackled sex—and the material manifestations of erotica—in all its corseted, cone-bra’d, satin, and lace glory.
This set critics agog. But is sex really so foreign in Kawakubo’s world? While it’s true that the designer rejects the idea that clothes must reveal the body to attract a partner, her use of transparency suggests she’s not a prude. It seems significant that the collection was shown in France, the land in which l’amour is a national sport and where Jean Baudrillard, the postmodern theorist, suggested that “seduction . . . never belongs to the order of nature, but that of artifice—never to the order of energy, but that of signs and rituals.” Defined thus, seduction sounds a lot like fashion, whose often outdated rules and assumptions are fuel to Kawakubo’s fire.
