Self-criticism is an absolute bitch for women and girls. Without a shadow of a doubt, Rei Kawakubo suffers it just as acutely as any of us. I have never seen a more searingly accurate image of internalized female psychological conditioning than in looks 12 and 13 from her Spring show. They had heavy chains strapped beneath their second-skin dresses, shackles spilling from their hems and sleeves, clanking as they walked. On their shoulders were lopped-off tailored jackets, as if somehow their flesh had been flayed, or peeled back to illustrate exactly what it is to carry binding limitations within your own anatomy: Can’t do this, shouldn’t do that, shut up, put up, and carry on.
There was no need to grope around for meaning: Kawakubo was unequivocally talking about herself this time. Ahead of the Comme des Garçons “Mini-show,” an announcement had been emailed by Kawakubo’s husband, Adrian Joffe, saying that Kawakubo was ceasing her 10-season practice of challenging boundaries of fashion by showing abstract forms. No matter that the symbolism embedded in her giant structures had awed, fascinated, and tantalized her audience. No matter that the conceptual, artistic image of the Comme des Garçons empire has only been enhanced by her “no clothes” showings. It was her: Lacerating-ly self-critical, she told herself to stop it. “I felt this approach was no longer new, and I looked for what is new, what is new. But I could not find it,” went the statement. “What I thought of in the end was a profoundly internal approach . . . about what’s deep inside.”
For any fashion practitioner, there is nothing braver or more terrifying than to drop all intellectual shields and arcane inspirations of the season and talk about oneself. This show was movingly personal, about one woman’s experience as a boss of a company whose creativity relies on her. It asserted her female physicality as integral to that productivity and her ideas of where it comes from. The bellies of the first few looks were pregnant with it: padded protrusions in the midsections of black sparkly oversize jumpsuits. One of them was cracked open in a zigzag, like a cartoon egg.
Inside, and on the leggings, what you glimpsed was the Comme des Garçons logo, handwritten as a print. Kawakubo hasn’t got children, but this is her creation, which sprang from within her and has gone on to proliferate in stores and her own retail empire all over the world.
It must be a pressure, keeping all those mouths fed. You felt that responsibility—ambivalently balanced with her drive to preserve her freedom to carve out new forms. The padded, pannier-like protrusions that began to appear at hip level might have had overtones of clothes hangers; when they traveled around the back of the body, poufing out jacket peplums, they reconfigured as something like bustles. Yes: There is a historical knowingness and sense of humor about what Kawakubo does. Her frustration with the limitations of the regular human form broke new ground decades ago, with her famous Lumps and Bumps collection. She is still at it, building out protrusions like a furniture upholsterer.
Something else about this: The clothes—or the sparkly textures of that which was caught in the process of becoming clothes—did not emit anything overarching-ly depressive or ominous. You sensed Kawakubo’s stoicism, and her maturity. Somehow, she was also talking about age, or perhaps wisdom accrued after years of experience. The models all wore white wigs. The gravelly voice of Tom Waits—her favorite musician, same-ish age as her—singing classic folk songs was on the soundtrack.
The clothes were her reworkings of her own classics: peplum jackets and coats, jumpsuit tuxedos, the things she does with knotting and draping fabric. Looks on the way to becoming all the variants that will end up in her Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons stores globally.
For all these reasons, there was something hugely emotional, poignant, and universal in this massively successful enigma of a woman deciding that she didn’t like what she was doing, that it wasn’t good enough, that she didn’t want to be trapped in what other people thought she might be saying. Probably, the truth is that in life we never really get to nail everything we want to say exactly to our satisfaction—not in the case of un-self-satisfied women, anyway.
Back to the chains inside: That was one of those images that are indelible, inspiring, and challenging. Can women cast them off? The first step is surely to admit they’re there in the first place. It was moving to see Rei Kawakubo showing us hers.
