Don’t Bother Me. Comme Des Garçons AW24

March 5, 2024March 5, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rei Kawakubo goes back to black. Her Comme Des Garçons collection was simply titled “Anger“. “This is about my present state of mind. I have anger against everything in the world, especially against myself.” Global conflicts, wars that seems to have no ending, general social unrest. Kawakubo seems to be angry at herself for being in the fashion industry, for its schemes and formats, and for being a designer herself. She instructed some of the show’s models to go out and vent, to break the fourth wall that divides the runway from audience. The third model, dressed in black polyurethane exploded-flare pants and a biker-jacket cape, suddenly did a massive clenched-fist stamp of frustration in the middle of the runway. Another model turned and loomed over some people in the front row, confrontationally invading their space with a bow-front pannier skirt. The constructs of extreme historical tropes of femininity – the pileups of rosettes, panniers, bows, and pompadour wigs – seemed to be on the brink of sarcastic self-parody. But then, a bride in white appeared in the show’s finale. Maybe there’s some light of hope at the end of this dark tunnel?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Cacophony of Joy. Comme Des Garçons SS24

October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rei Kawakubo, the visionary designer who is known for responding to global unrests and deep, existential dilemmas through her Comme Des Garçons garments, this season seemed to simply say “fuck it, let me have some fun” with the cacophony of electric colours, hysterically clashing patterns and a range of fantastically irrational, bulbous shapes. Finding happiness and emanating with joy are some of the biggest forces of resistance.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Return To The Source. Comme Des Garçons AW23

March 6, 2023March 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Trust Rei Kawakubo to deliver a powerful, ritual-like show. The show notes from Comme des Garçons “Return to the Source” collection mused about “a feeling of wanting to go back to the starting point”. For the Japanese designer, the concept of creating something completely new through the medium of a garment has always been a relentless, sometimes brutal, yet deeply beautiful motivation. For autumn-winter 2023, Kawakubo talked of “working with free patterns” and “using basic materials” in terms of her wearable, highly-deconstructed forms. She sent out 11 separate groups, like mini-families. Each group had their own idiosyncratic mood and music. Some wore recognizable Comme garments (rosettes on a full skirt topped with a quilted funnel neck poncho that stood proud of the body), other looks were far more abstract (a pilgrim collared black wool box, paired with another box-shaped dress). Another piece looked like an exploded dress, its wadding and padding violently bursting out from within. The gorgeous headwear could be read as an interpretation of different East-European folklore traditions. All of that was a truly touching fashion moment.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Stand Together. Comme Des Garçons SS23

October 5, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

“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. Rei Kawakubo is 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, normal escapist service has been resumed. But this was anti-fashion. Kawakubo’s process is personal and private: The design and its agenda is her business. 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? Was look 16 a flowery doughnut or an ironically framed metaphysical void? 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. 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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Black Rose. Comme Des Garcons AW22

March 15, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

“For me, the dark beauty of the black rose symbolizes courage, resistance, and freedom”, Rei Kawakubo stated regarding her Comme des Garçons autumn-winter 2022 show presented a few days ago in Tokyo. The black rose in Irish culture is a symbol of resistance against British rule. It might be a bit hard to discern it in the Comme lineup – it only comes in, patterned on a sort of Victoriana brocade at the 12th of the 16 exits. It’s certain that anti-British imperialism in Ireland is what Kawakubo meant, though, because the haunting music – “a beautiful resistance song from Ireland, Roisin Dubh, the little black rose,” was recorded for the show by the Northern Irish slow flautist Ciaran Carlin. Possibly that’s the most political reference Kawkubo’s made in her work – it has no equivalence to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, except for the common factor of dangerously contested borders. But anyway: how to put words to her clothes? Was a sense of dark history, something primal, or even medieval going on? It seemed so to begin with anyway, what with Kawkubo’s use of thick, wadded, speckled-gray felt carpet underlay (or something similar) and headpieces created by Gary Card bulging with assortments of rough, rolled up fabrics. Other hand-crocheted floppy woollen hats had the air of bonnets, country-cottage style. Comme des Garçons hasn’t been showing outside Tokyo for two years, and Paris Fashion Week really misses its presence. Hopefully, Kawakubo (as well as Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya) returns to the French runway next season.