Like a fresh breeze in a dusty room with a window just thrown open, Kenzo’s first-thing Saturday morning show was a comprehensive cobweb-clearer thanks to 100 or so choristers who performed a version of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” arranged by Thomas Roussel.
We were quite far from the center of the city, by the Peripherique; outside the venue, a group of women in hijabs and reflective jackets was distributing food from the back of a cart to the homeless. Just a few blocks up was the kosher supermarket where the post–Charlie Hebdo siege unfolded. Jackson’s stirring utopian lyric of tolerance isn’t always easy to see reflected in the world around us—but it can be—and to hear it sung so purely was a joyful thing.
The clothes! Carol Lim and Humberto Leon said their starting point was a Blur gig they attended in Tokyo back in 1995. (“Don’t date us!” protested Leon.) There was certainly an of-that-time shadow in the kicky pant shape, the slouchy sweats featuring Kenzo Takada’s signature italic, and the Buffalo-touched, bulked-up sneakers, some of them patterned. (P.S. Around 1992, this reviewer lived in a Camden-bought cotton hoodie that went to mid-thigh and featured a similar space-out of arcing grids, which dates me.) A Fido Dido looseness and Spiral Tribe–meets–Daisy Age color was accented by dance floor roue suiting in lacquer-coated croc-pattern jacquard—later mirrored in the berry-mix panels on velvet shirts. A look-at-it-to-see, kissing-couple pattern wool jacquard made for highly embraceable coats and bombers that glinted with peace sign metal hardware. This was a nostalgic eye-popper of a collection with plenty of potential for contemporary integration. “Love in the ’90s is paranoid,” Damon Albarn sings on Live at the Budokan—plus ça change.
