Comme des Garcons: Magic Act
By Cathy Horyn
For any number of reasons, many things in fashion look dated. Magazines look dated. Stores look dated. Lots of clothes look dated, including many we saw only yesterday. We’ve seen talented designers put forward craft and savoir faire, like Alber Elbaz with a super Lanvin collection. And many others have surprised us by moving in a new or more accessible direction, like Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga with his satin drapery and John Galliano with his Persian motifs at Dior. But while these collections show a great deal of hard work and focus — as you’d expect, given the daunting economic picture — we feel somehow they are not very ambitious. They are almost too easy to understand. The mastery of a particular dressmaking technique, however pleasing the result, is not proof of an extraordinary sensibility. Indeed, after marveling at a technique we gradually come to realize that it’s still the same old technique and that really nothing has changed or improved our understanding of fashion. We feel empty, in fact.
Tonight, in her Comme des Garcons show, Rei Kawakubo used all the traditional techniques. She had drapery and tailoring, and she was aware of creating an attractive silhouette, as many designers have been this season. Yet where the brilliant Ms. Kawakubo parted company with the rest is her powerful sensibility. It is always in control. She opened with tent dresses in pale beige tulle and others in olive drab, the models’ faces covered by strips of tulle embroidered with a single red sequin smudge, as if from a kiss. The models’ hair looked like balls of fuchsia yarn, and they wore tulle leggings that sagged like limp nylons.
With those basic elements — and basically weird elements — Ms. Kawakubo began to express the notion that “nothing is as it appears,” as she characterized her purpose later backstage.
The olive drab tent became a canvas for a jacket pattern, drawn in black lines with dots to mark buttons. In the next incarnation there was a poncho coat that combined a rose wool plaid with the top half of a khaki trench coat. Another poncho coat, in a bold black-and-white check, had a square corner of olive drab near the hem. From a shapeless mass of fabric, then, she found the elements she needed to produce not merely tailored and draped garments but also a series of beautiful silhouettes. Her most effective results were with the tulle. She used it to literally encase or trap layers of cream pleated dresses, creating a single garment. These were ingenious: long, slim dresses with feminine frills, including strands of pearls, held and compressed by a tulle skin. The show, presented in the round, ended with a bittersweet version of the song “Mad World.”
Maybe it’s no surprise that Ms. Kawakubo has been responsible for a number of the truly emotional experiences in fashion. This was another of those occasions. The applause was loud and long. The designer did not come out, of course. She almost never does. When I got backstage, she was waiting alone, staring at something on the floor. She had on an olive drab jacket and sunglasses that blended with her shiny hair.
...the things I'll do to own some of these pieces, this is trully on of my favorite collections of her
For some reason I get quite a comforted feeling just looking at this collection.
