Comme des Garçons’s runway clothing comprises, apparently, just 25 percent of their total output. You sense that when you go to the company’s showrooms on the Place Vendôme, pawing through the racks of riffs on runway looks, digesting the often extreme ideas into garments that are covetable, buyable, even wearable. It challenges the perception of Comme as “challenging.” The Comme des Garçons Shirt and Boy lines are presented to a huddle of press and buyers in the same showroom. It starts dead on time, or thereabouts, so the real business of selling can begin.
For Fall, Comme des Garçons Shirt also challenged the idea of the shirt as a flat two-dimensional surface. In one instance it was emphasized, offering the button-up oxford as a blank canvas for Japanese artist Masaho Anotani to deface with scribbled prints. Extra dimension—physically, and of design—was added by scissoring holes into the poplin, with strips of fabric appliquéd, say, across a gouged-open chest, to suspend the lower part. It’s an idea the Shirt line has offered before, but the simplicity of the notion allows multiple permutations. This time, buckles and straps were inserted as well, the shirt sometimes tugged out low at the hem into a flowing smock. Others disrupted the surface by pumping out scallops or stars with wadded padding across the shoulders and yoke; one scarred the ribcage with zips, left open.
You fall a lot into description when discussing Comme des Garçons Shirt, running through the litany of treatments of the namesake item. It’s the ingenuity of that approach that is constantly thrilling, the idea of a designer working within such narrow confines and trying to search out something new. Conversely, Comme des Garçons Shirt isn’t just shirts. There were sweaters too, and trousers, and jackets—wardrobe staples tweaked. The jackets were quilted workman styles, or snuggly cut in gray stretch gabardine. Knitwear was patched, aerated, multicolored. The Boy collection played with plaid, another Comme signature, contrasting multiple clan patterns in outfits filled to the brim with schoolboy glee. Gleeful is a good word for Comme des Garçons Boy, and Shirt. There’s a playfulness to the whole offering that’s consistently infectious. That’s the neat niche those labels have quickly carved out for themselves in the Comme universe.
