The CdG Shirt Sunday service started as ever very close to its advertised time of 9:15am: unlike the mainline show, or Junya, or pretty much anything else (Marc aside) with this show if you snooze, you lose. I didn’t snooze (oh no) but a very dysfunctional Uber Jump bike (the fastest way of moving around Paris during the strike) meant puffing into Place Vendôme with three minutes to spare and a sweat on.
Inside the showroom the crowd was arranged in a manner to make tinned sardines seem isolated. The first four models strode forth in layered shirts, jackets and hoodies featuring a 1980s archive artwork by Futura, aka Lenny McGurr. His layered visual landscapes also emerged in looks 29 to 33, here on shirts with fronts that had (in order) been latticed, given a pleat bib, given overlaid circular cut-outs, and given abstract, kidney-shaped overlaid cut-outs. Afterwards McGurr said he’d met Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe at Dover Street Market, and done a small collaboration for a surprise Commes “Black Market” drop last year, which had lead to this. “It’s very flattering,” said McGurr afterwards. “We selected a couple of pieces and said to Rei and Adrian ‘Just interpret them as you wish.’ It’s such an honor and you know you are going to get something great.”
McGurr was on the money. Even beyond the garments featuring his art, the collection more broadly was pretty great. Standouts included the shirts layered, latticed or lined with variations of Jermyn Street stripe; the bisected pink and yellow or pink and lavender shirts and the bisected elongated-front shorts with extra sleeves. There was an interesting tartan section with long scarfs layered under jackets and the mixed-material pants in the early 30s were a significant addition to my ever-growing list of bucket list britches. Asides included consideration of the Björk-ness of the models’ multi-angled top knots and a slowly steadying heartbeat: so endeth the lesson.
