“I needed to take one breath in the monochrome serenity.” In the Comme des Garçons look book sent from Tokyo, Rei Kawakubo’s 20 models looked as if they might be ascending on clouds, borne up on big, romantic, Victoriana black and white shapes. Except for the ever so slightly disturbing shadows falling behind each woman on the backdrop, the effect might almost have been ethereal.
From such small clues must we try to decipher the mood of the legendary creator. The first line of her press release spoke of her impulse to block out the “inundation of information”—something we’re surely all relating to as a mental health tactic at the moment. But it’s telling to see what remained—or arose—when Kawakubo assigned herself the task of embodying “serenity” in her collection. For one thing: “monochrome” was always the original Comme des Garçons factory setting. In the early ’80s, right at the start of her showing in Paris, Kawakubo’s uncompromising use of black was deemed shocking and “conceptual” (probably this was where that tag became attached to nonconformist fashion in the first place). Her radical rejection of Eurocentric standards of design was so influential that it caused a generation of alternative-minded women to clad themselves only in black for a decade and a half, and often for life.
But this collection, in its intention to separate itself from the worldly cares of 2021, isn’t a minimalist stripping-away of the signs and symbols of fashion at all. There’s something sumptuously Edwardian-Victorian about all these black cloaks with puffy white linings, ballooning crinolines, frothy layers of whipped white cotton and black tulle. With the addition of the rakish stovepipe hats from Ibrahim Kamara, it could almost—almost—come across as a modernist echo of Cecil Beaton’s My Fair Lady Ascot scene.
Comme de Garçons’s “monchrome serenity” comes from an escapist place. Is it a tender, playful, and nostalgic place too? The longer you look, the more beautiful things are revealed: tufted coats and classically tailored jackets amongst the puffballs and drum-like skirts. It’s nice to imagine that Kawakubo might have been having fun being absorbed in all of this. For creative people, making and imagining is a safe space. Whatever it was that was flowing through her mind at the time, it looked like a resistance against melancholy, even with those shadows at her back.
