During the first 12 looks of this show, the only sounds in the Comme des Garçons space on the Place Vendôme were keyboard rattles, Sunday-at-9-a.m. throat-clearings, the pseudo-shutters of camera phones, and the squeak of All Stars on parquet. These dozen looks were the first runway outing for Comme des Garçons Shirt Boy, a juvenile-styled (although not age-specific to wear) subset of Shirt. They were perfect kernels of the clothes you want when you're a 17-year-old guy (or a decrepit Peter Pan): wicked little blousons, skater-touched shorts, and clinical shirting. The boldest garment was a high trouser with inbuilt suspender straps; it sounds a bit Amish but could look Fresh Prince-ly on a podium.
Then, some music and Shirt proper. Apart from the wigs—angry, pre-product-Elvis vertical tufts—the focus was on basics, clinically observed then zha-shooshed with intense discipline. The Shirt—as Rei Kawakubo would capitalize it—was at first imprinted with the calligraphic pulsings of Henryk Tomaszewski, a nine-years-dead Polish poster designer whose work is nicely described by the Japanese graphic designer Shigeo Fukuda, in Tomaszewski's Guardian obituary, as conveying "the same infinite world as a single flower arranged in solitude." So: pattern, visibly hand-drafted, with depth.
Any haunter of London's Jermyn Street—the Savile Row of shirts, and an altogether richer menswear thoroughfare—will attest that the centuries of collective refinement from Hilditch & Key (who make Lagerfeld's shirts), Budd, Turnbull & Asser, Emma Willis, and the rest leave you feeling that the shirt is an elemental garment whose permutations have long since been exhausted. Here, with startling casualness, we saw some new variations: gaped weft panels at the shoulder and chest in blue gingham and pink, Bengal stripe transmitted to outerwear, shirt-hoodies (shoodies?), and masculine versions of the pattern-mash-up shirts that so many editors were wearing last season. A blue cord-armed jacket and its gray flannel-armed brother that had bodies patched in suede sections dyed teak, rust, green, and liver were variations of those slightly naff (but sweet) patchwork Harris caps that the older gents in Milan favor. This was a luminous-to-watch meditation on the menswear canon. And, best of all, you could imagine yourself wearing it.
