From Tokyo, where all the Comme des Garçons family of designers have been showing, an email suggested that Rei Kawakubo has been striving to arrive at a creative resolution for designing in the midst of the existential plight that we’re all suffering. Dissonance was her theme, explained thus: “The human brain always looks for harmony and logic. When logic is denied, when there is dissonance a powerful moment is created which leads you to feel an inner turmoil and tension that can lead to finding positive change and progress.”
Any note of hope is gratefully received in these times of chaos. Discerned through the red light of her set—surely a signifier of the hellish state of the world—her prescription for survival seemed threaded through with a playful, ironic sense of humor. Voluminous shapes, crinolines, bubbles, cloaks, and trapezoid coats—quite ideal for social distancing—came covered in plastic film. Stare at them awhile, and you might start thinking of Cecil Beaton’s cellophane concoctions for the bright young things of the 1920s, transposed into our 2020 age of PPE.
Then, what was Kawakubo up to, playing with Mickey Mouse and the Japanese Bearbrick teddy bear toy? Cutely reassuring representations of childhood innocence to cling to in our times of trouble, perhaps. Or maybe we can read them as rather more satirical political ciphers? The thing about Kawakubo is that her work brilliantly captures so many dissonant ideas at the same time. A phrase in her notes said she was interested in disrupting “the spirit of couture” with “illogical combinations and juxtapositions.” You sense she likes both the romance and glitter of couture and the messing with it, though—and this time, it almost felt like she’d had fun with it.
