Fall 2017 Ready-to-Wear Comme des Garçons

PARIS, March 4, 2017

Rei Kawakubo’s shows are such a trip into the beyond. To enter as a spectator is to be certain only that you’re going to be seeing her enacting something that is post-fashion—never about catching trends or flogging garments. All you can do is hand over to your eyes, switch your hippocampus to high alert, and hope to name the visual and cultural associations that start scrolling up. Kawakubo disables the usual instruments by which we fash-judge. It’s anxiety-making and thrilling. You have to feel something—even if it’s that you are a blundering idiot, not understanding.

This is what happened for Fall 2017—the last collection that will make it into the Comme des Garçons exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in May. A pair of women walked out, encased in large armless forms with bulbously sculptural curves made out of white wadding. First impression: They were wonkily exaggerated dress forms of the stock studio kind every designer drapes fabric on. Then came the stream of secondaries: the Venus de Milo, the Venus of Willendorf, snow women, women haplessly trapped in an outsize parody of the absurdity of female form.

Then came the gray shapes. Craning foward, it seemed they were made of recycled fabric waste—the residue stuff that is mashed together from a zillion dead garments. Was that an indictment of the damage fast-fashion production wreaks on the planet? A call to others to consider the aesthetics as well as the ethics of recycled material? Or both?