Rei Kawakubo has cast a spell over her audience. The fashion community strives to keep believing that fashion can touch deeper meanings in this time of often bewildering industrial change, and she's the one people turn to for some kind of emotional stimulus that goes beyond the blunt service of commerce. Once more this season, she again blocked the expectation that she would offer anything recognizable as clothes. Instead she mounted a monumental sculptural meditation on “Blue Witches,” a coda further explained by her husband Adrian Joffe as “Powerful women who are misunderstood, but do good in the world.”
Was she talking about herself? Comme des Garçons, as a retail operation, has grown against all odds as an independent multibrand chain which buys young designers, whom Kawakubo personally approves, and sells their work in branches in Tokyo, New York, and London. They definitely regard her as a woman with magical transformative powers who they hold in awe. In those stores, meanwhile, Kawakubo’s own conceptual collections reappear in simpler, wearable forms, right down to ranges of T-shirts which indicate her original runway styles in cool ways.
Whether or not that qualifies Kawakubo as a literal “Witch,” it can safely be predicted that the ideas she put forth on her Spring runaway will make their way, in far more accessible forms, to her shops all over the word. That surely gives her the right to go as experimental and extreme as she did this season.
