Is Rei Kawakubo calling for a revolution? Or just illustrating, in a conceptual ritual of flowery circumstance, that luxury fashion has reached such a pinnacle of decadence that it must be in for a fall? Granted, neither of those readings might be immediately apparent simply by looking at the exaggerated carnival procession of multiple rose-patterned jacquards, amalgams of upholstery and corsetry, flounces and furbelows, abstract armor, sugar-pink rubber frills, and bondage straps that walked in the Comme des Garçons show. But then there were her words: She was “imagining punks in the 18th century, which was a time of so many revolutions.”
Kawakubo’s runway collections started contradicting any notion that they might be literally “ready-to-wear” a long time ago. Instead, she uses her space, and the attention of her audience, to hint and disturb. She is, after all, showing in the capital of France, and here she was, using materials associated with the riches of Versailles, and building them into 3-D structures of gilded rose-strewn furnishing fabrics. Among these portable excrescences there were shapes reminiscent of pannier skirts, corsets, stomachers, and many suggestions of articulated armor. The whole thing was set off with black, skewwhiff 18th-century gentlemen’s wigs. The “punks”? An un-missable presence in powder-pink patent and vinyl.
As it happens, Kawakubo’s thought processes also channel the fashion news of the moment: the flounces, the vastly expanded shoulders, the jacquards in their innumerable floral patterns. The atmosphere in the room wasn’t heavy—in fact, the charming notes of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” tinkled from time to time.
But was that meant to be uplifting or satirical? As Kawakubo well knows, the revolutionaries are already at the gates of Paris—because she supports them in her Dover Street Market stores, and sets the example of being the independent godmother of them all. If you can call young designers like Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy, and Simon Porte Jacquemus “punks,” it all fits beautifully under the massive wings of those loopy Comme des Garçons dresses.
