Rei Kawakubo’s shows are such a trip into the beyond. To enter as a spectator is to be certain only that you’re going to be seeing her enacting something that is post-fashion—never about catching trends or flogging garments. All you can do is hand over to your eyes, switch your hippocampus to high alert, and hope to name the visual and cultural associations that start scrolling up. Kawakubo disables the usual instruments by which we fash-judge. It’s anxiety-making and thrilling. You have to feel something—even if it’s that you are a blundering idiot, not understanding.
This is what happened for Fall 2017—the last collection that will make it into the Comme des Garçons exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in May. A pair of women walked out, encased in large armless forms with bulbously sculptural curves made out of white wadding. First impression: They were wonkily exaggerated dress forms of the stock studio kind every designer drapes fabric on. Then came the stream of secondaries: the Venus de Milo, the Venus of Willendorf, snow women, women haplessly trapped in an outsize parody of the absurdity of female form.
Then came the gray shapes. Craning foward, it seemed they were made of recycled fabric waste—the residue stuff that is mashed together from a zillion dead garments. Was that an indictment of the damage fast-fashion production wreaks on the planet? A call to others to consider the aesthetics as well as the ethics of recycled material? Or both?
Following that was a lone sighting of something recognizably precious and beautiful: a piece of something akin to black couture lace, reembroidered with minute jet beads, smoothed seamlessly over an almost traditional dummy-shape with a belled skirt. Handcraft glorified, the work of wonderful skilled hands. But then...oh no! A mound of screwed-up brown paper of the kind used by pattern-makers advanced. Could that be a despairingly realistic signal that the old methods are as finished as the horse and cart in the age of the internal combustion engine, or, more to the point, a fashion production system already entering a computer-designed era, in which printed-out garments are said to be on the way?
One can overthink at a Comme des Garçons show. Truth be told, the mood never portended an ominous end-of-days scenario. The shapes that walked on next were bubbles made from synthetic silver insulation materials suggesting—perhaps—space-age travel, and after that, a giant white trench coat, the size of a small planet.
In the end, Kawakubo issued few words beyond the title of the collection, “The Future of Silhouette.” That seemed to confirm that she had indeed been meditating on the nature of fashion itself, its processes, and where it might go next. Few are the designers big enough to challenge the audience to think and feel like Kawakubo does.