Operatic grandeur, a gorgeous extravagance of haute couture fabrics, color, and embroidery—this transporting wonder took to the stage at Comme des Garçons today. What a mind-bending surprise—all these rich, historical brocades, 3D flowers, glinting jacquards, and padded pouf skirts! Rei Kawakubo is not known for narrative—we assume her collections to be her free-form reaction to the condition of the world—but this collection was a long preplanned event.
What we were watching was Kawakubo’s act two of Orlando—her parallel response to her ongoing project with the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, a sister rule-breaker in her field. Act three is to be revealed in Kawakubo’s costumes for Neuwirth’s premiere adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the Vienna State Opera in December—the debut of the first-ever female composer to be commissioned for a production in that house.
Kawakubo has been trailing this joint exploration of Woolf’s novel about an Elizabethan boy who becomes a woman through the passage of centuries. The Homme Plus show in June, reviewed on Vogue Runway, was cited as act one in the cycle. The open-ended freedom to tackle the subject matter of identity and gender hand-in-hand with a musical establishment–challenger who has been described as pushing boundaries “to chart the unknown”—well, that’s a one-off opportunity right up Rei Kawakubo’s nonconformist street.
It was backstory kismet, as far as Kawakubo’s Spring collection is concerned. The joyful celebration of high European culture serendipitously interconnected with the feelings which have been playing through fashion—not least with the sheer coincidence that Christian Lacroix, haute couture hero turned opera costumier, also made a return to the Paris fashion stage this week with his collaboration with Dries Van Noten. Escapism, maximalism, the reverence for the arcane skills of the human hand—current conversations about all these things can be read into today’s show.
Kawakubo had spent hours visiting the archive at the Vienna Opera, where more than 250,000 costumes are stored. Yet her path is always her own. At least a third of this collection—the shapes in black—could be read as the ‘transforming’ part of the Orlando story, a very different identity from the colorful one at the beginning. Black is in fashion, too. But who knows—was that closer to something like a self-portrait? What’s for certain: It whetted the appetite to see what will finally emerge on the stage in Vienna this winter.
