The degree to which we clutch at straws when trying to compute what’s crossing our field of vision at Comme des Garçons turns out to be Rei Kawakubo’s measure of satisfaction. At this stage in her legendary career, what’s still driving her is the tantalizing goal of being able to make work that relates to nothing else; that triggers no associations; is devoid of storytelling and free of history, politics, or satire; and is incapable of being interpreted as belonging to any culture or subconscious brew of any of the above. After her fall 2020 show, Kawakubo rhetorically stated as much in an email. “Is it impossible to make something completely and utterly new, since we are all living in this world?”
Well, she certainly communicated her dilemmas on the Comme runway. Among the 20 looks she sent out—bulbous bubbles, ledged pieces apparently made for furniture, towering headpieces—it felt like she was aiming to design for some post-world state. Within it, beauty was invoked, what with all the towering lace headdresses. And every look had its own separate blast of music to accompany it.
The trouble is, though, you can’t see a pair of gigantic sleeves without thinking about Renaissance portraits, or observe the winglike rig of a veil without guessing at the Dutch Masters. Everything on this planet does indeed remind us of something else—that’s what the human eye can’t help doing.
And that goes too for the Comme-ologists in the crowd. There appeared to be echoes aplenty of CDG collections past in there—the Flat collection; the ones that seemed to be about weddings and funerals; fragmented reminders of the Lumps and Bumps presentation. But were we really seeing that? The sensation of watching Kawakubo’s shows is that of wondering if you’re imagining things. Perhaps that’s actually where she really wants us—to keep us in that bewildered, post-sense state. But no, this season she admitted it was true. In a kicker line to her postshow note, she wrote: “Continuing my work as a perpetual futurist, I worked from within the CDG world.”
