Rei Kawakubo issued the starkest press statement that I have read from her—or any other designer. Her collection was simply titled Anger. “This is about my present state of mind. I have anger against everything in the world, especially against myself.”
You can absolutely see, and agree with, the first part—how Kawakubo is feeling about the intractable terribleness of what is happening in the world—and applaud her for saying it. Of course, her entire collection was black—although Kawakubo has practically owned black since the 1980s. What hit as far more shocking was to see one of the undisputed greatest in fashion, the woman revered and looked up to by generations, declaring she’s even more angry with herself than with the state of the world.
Perhaps it’s her frustration with being unable to prevent evil as an individual citizen. The rage of powerlessness. And on top of that, there’s her remorseless self-criticism for saying this as a fashion designer. She’s someone who has agitated for freedom of expression for a cool 55 years (she set up Comme des Garçons in 1969), and yet here she is: Still implicated in a nonprogressive industry and its set rituals.
Such as, putting on a fashion show.
For the first time that I can remember, Kawakubo broke her own house rule concerning the impassive deportment of her female models. She instructed some of them to go out and vent, to rip the fabric of the fourth wall that divides the models from audience and photographers. When 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, everyone laughed. We got it.
Later, a model turned and loomed over some people in the front row, confrontationally invading their space with a bow-front pannier skirt. Two more stomped halfway up the runway, looked at the photographers, and turned around again, as if to say, “Oh, can I be bothered with this?”
If that’s a proper reading—the state of mind of a woman in revolt against the systems she’s caught in—the symbolism embedded in the clothes complicated it further. One look was made of two soft zippered boxes, printed with barbed wire. Another was stamped with chains. The constructs of extreme historical tropes of femininity—the pileups of rosettes, panniers, bows, and pompadour wigs seemed (if you’d read Kawakubo’s show message) to be on the brink of sarcastic self-parody.
Kawakubo is not alone in pointing to the darkness and grotesquerie of the times we are trapped in. She is, however, the only designer who has expressed it so scathingly from a woman’s point of view. We felt her anger and honesty. After all these years, though she may not believe it herself, her courage in confronting the unsayable is exactly what fills us with admiration and gratitude.
