Rei Kawakubo is not one of fashion’s escapists. All the heaviness of a world messed up by the actions of humans was visited on the rectangle of space in Paris designated by Comme des Garçons as “a gathering of the shadows.”
There was no mistaking the darkness of the free association going on in the forms of the clothes—though Kawakubo pushed the imagination of the audience to grasp at exactly what malign forces she was portraying. An excruciating soundtrack helped as an aural guide to the sight of women encased in black rubber armor with protruding hips and shoulder braces, nightmare peaked hoods, and ecclesiastical-seeming headdresses. Booms carrying movie lights zoomed in to loom aggressively over the women, throwing the complexities of the shapes and textures of their clothing into relief: strange cut-short farthingales, sleeves like banks of oil-slicked seaweed, dark Victorian taffeta ruffles, a puffball skirt uneasily hinting at the shape of an unexploded bomb.
No doubt about it: The workmanship in these garments was phenomenal—whether in the sculptural rubber pieces, emitting their simultaneous signals of submarine hulls, or warheads and fetish dungeon, or the intensely layered 3-D embroideries. But who were these people—a sinister cult reveling in the fruits of militaristic and environmental destruction, awarding themselves medals of brass coat hooks, gilt cherubs, and door latches? Was that a mea culpa from a representative of the fashion industry—the cobwebby fishnet puffball buoyed by plastic Bubble Wrap?
Well, the soundscape background of the beating of heavy, militaristic machinery, with waves of an indistinct but dictatorial male voice, the roar of helicopter rotors, and agonizingly poignant snatches of children singing the English Victorian hymn “All things bright and beautiful/the Lord God made them all” certainly pointed to man-made ecological destruction, as well as the aggression of escalating militarism.
Wherever we are in the world, these are the fears and dreads we experience in the background of everyday life. Rei Kawakubo confronted them. “She reads the news; she knows what’s happening,” said her husband, Adrian Joffe. The music was a collaboration with the young London queer artist and DJ Parma Ham, while the consciousness pointed to a generalized fear of the 21-century arms race from an Asian perspective, what with Donald Trump playing with fire with the North Korean dictatorship, and Japanese political protest about the plan to move an American military base to an ocean site, endangering the marine environment, as well as peace. No War was a slogan stamped on a pair of tartan pants.
Still, Kawakubo’s message was perhaps not all despair and condemnation. There was a second clause to her gathering of the shadows collection title. “Many small shadows come together to make one powerful thing.” Of course, that is a double-edged statement, indicating the human potential for good, as well as for evil. But when the models clustered in a circle at the end of the show, you wondered, in a brief flash of hope, whether Kawakubo was overseeing a kind of women’s ritual exorcism of all the bad. Either way, it was a wake-up call from one of fashion’s great seers that it’s time to stand up and be counted, not to look away.
