The cultish Comme des Garçons Shirt show, staged unofficially each Saturday morning of Paris menswear week, is an oddly intense experience. Barely a foot from the models, a small group of editors and a larger group of buyers cram into the label’s relatively small showroom on the Place Vendôme. You can hear the creak of the boards under each footstep, always aware of the constant castanet clatter of the photographers’ shutters.
It’s also intense because of the clothes on show—both Comme des Garçons Shirt line and one called Boy, but the focus feels tightly edited around shirting for both labels. That focus in turn focuses the viewer, watching limitless reiterations of shirting in an odd, unexpectedly open fusion of commerce and art. The commercial aspect of Comme des Garçons is not to be overlooked; the company turns over approximately $220 million annually. That’s because the extreme vision boils down easily, without surrounding its soul. The sloganing of the Spring 2017 Homme Plus show was echoed in the boldly scribbled lettering decorating the Boy clothes; while the interpretations on shirting were engaging, inventive, and appealing.
These shows frequently present their clothing in passages of four or five outfits, riffing on particular notions or decorative motifs. A bunch of shirts, cut like smocks with wide boat necklines; a quartet of souvenir jackets; a selection scribbled with cartoons by Noah Lyon, son of photographer Danny Lyon (whose show “Message to the Future” is on through September at the Whitney in NYC). There was also a punk-infused section of strapped-up numbers, oddly chiming with a taste for bondage and kink manifesting itself as an overall theme for spring.
The variations on army shirting collaged into regular white poplin looked so good, Comme showed them twice—one camo, one plain khaki, in both cases appliquéd and patched to resemble the one fabric cracking through the surface of the the other, like something hidden breaking through.
There’s something sublimely satisfying about seeing these reinventions of such a basic, workaday item of the masculine wardrobe, about the simple design task of making something humdrum exciting, but not alienating. Blue-collar conceptualism. How’s that for a label?
