Rei Kawakubo put on a hugely enjoyable display of over-the-top fabulosity today—a show created from frills and fantasy, and crinolines, and lace, and flowers—her vision of super-girly Vaudevillian charm, taken to delightful heights of excess. Comme des Garçons Camp, she called it—and then she broke with a habit a lifetime, sending out an email to explain more.
Kawakubo had been reading “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay. “Susan Sontag wrote about a creative movement and sensibility, Camp,” said the email. “I can really relate to this vision. Camp is not something horribly exaggerated, out of the ordinary, or in bad taste. This collection came out of the feeling that, on the contrary, camp is really and truly something deep and new, and represents a value that we need. For example, there are so many so-called styles such as punk that have lost their original rebel spirit today. I think camp can express something deeper, and give birth to progress.”
In our age of austerity, tension, and strife, it was indeed a countercultural gesture to see Kawakubo giving full rein to the voluptuous enjoyment of sparkling surfaces, textiles, and prettiness. From the beginning, she defied the usual expectation that her audience brings to a Comme show—the feeling that something dark will lie behind whatever is about to unfold. This time, there really wasn’t. Kawakubo is the first to chafe against the restraints of habit, or of what others might assume she thinks. And so she proceeded to put on a performance which seemed to speak of loveliness and innocence; a place where the cynicism and nastiness of the world can be bravely pushed aside, if only for a minute.
There were two old-fashioned theater lights suspended low over the runway—a subliminal scene-setter for the entrance of a dreamy Comme des Garçons princess bride, in a stately fantasia of a padded lace frock coat and an ivory multilayered lace gown with a train. Then the music, and the glitter-strewn headdresses—tripled buns, flapper bobs, finger waves—accompanied the progress of a troupe of Jazz Age ingenues onto the stage. One of them had her face framed in a huge black lace-trimmed star, like a Busby Berkeley dancer. Another had a fuchsia net ball-skirt with a black lace-smothered pouf at the waist. A third was subsumed in a whipped-cream meringue of piles of net and tulle, over a ballerina tutu of wondrous proportions.
Susan Sontag apart, it was a creative tour de force which contained so many ideas, techniques, textures, and shapes within its layers that it could fuel a dozen further collections. Undoubtedly it will, from Kawakubo’s own hand, as she adapts and filters things to fill her own stores in the fall. But also: This was one of those Comme des Garçons collections which is an uplifting shot in the arm for fashion in general; an argument for creativity and the joy of dressing up. It ended in a moment of sweetness which will be a memory of the season—Kawakubo’s girls, lining up hand in hand, smiling at the audience as they left the stage. As Sontag wrote in that essay, “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, not judgment. Camp is generous, it wants to enjoy. . . . Camp is a tender feeling.”
