“A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today/ And a feeling of wanting to stand together.” So disclosed the press notes for the return of Comme des Garçons to Paris this evening. That’s not to say that this was a sorrowful event: Simone Rocha, Rick Owens, Michèle Lamy, Francesco Risso, and Molly Goddard were all scattered among the serried sitters, standees, and snappers in a room that buzzed with tangible and happy anticipation before the first look came out. Rei Kawakubo was back.
And trust Kawakubo to lean against the prevailing winds, then transport us further and in fewer looks because of it. Last season, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fashionland scrambled to be somber, doffing the cap. This season, as that invasion and many other frightening geopolitical scenarios rumble on—just more in the background—normal escapist service has been resumed. But this was anti-fashion. Kawakubo invited us to take a beat, let our smiles slip, and look inward to the apparently inescapable in order to thwart it together.
Kawakubo’s process is personal and private: The design and its agenda is her business. What’s our business is how we choose to interpret it. Here there were perhaps a few readable clues in a collection whose looks were abstractedly sculptural. The models were their podiums. Was look 4 a worn egg cup or a woman inverted? I’d say the latter. Was look 16 a flowery doughnut or an ironically framed metaphysical void? Very possibly the former. But you might say something else entirely about these worn impressions. The only thing we’d all agree upon is that this was not conventional clothing.
The level of fabric research was intense and heightened; slickly sheeny lacquered lace and sugary-sweet, color-heaped floral jacquards. On some looks you could see the fossilized traces of “normal” pieces—a biker here, a gown there—but all were distended and distorted and blown up or reduced via twists and aggregations of imagination. This was not regular sizing either, Salomon-collab sneakers apart. The pieces were dark embraces.
Some of the models wore headpieces in folded card flowers or apparently hodgepodge steampunk-ish assemblages, half-helmet, half-crown. Created under a briefing by Gary Card and Valériane Venance, these looked to resemble virgin crants, the maiden’s garlands in which young, prematurely deceased women were buried in pre-Reformation England. They were chilling. In look 12 that sinister aspect washed against the buoying impression of the cloth-clad shapes below that appeared to urge the wearer up again.
On a possibly boring personal note, watching and then reviewing this collection today has made me flash back to my earliest seasons, eons ago, when I used to feel like a nervous fraud at every show I attended. In the absence of Sarah Mower for a season (she’s at a happy family event), I was handed a shot at Comme, and it revived that gnawing question that nagged me back then: What gives me the right to have an opinion about this? I was gripped by the same impostor syndrome that Edward Enninful (of all nonimpostors) describes so surprisingly and finely in his autobiography. And I guess the answer is, if you don’t feel like an impostor sometimes, then you probably shouldn’t be here at all.
