It is unbelievable to see the crowds of young people, teenagers, and probably fashion students who turn up to jostle and call outside the Comme des Garçons show these days. The street-noise from the fans of Rei Kawakubo was still penetrating the venue until it was over-ridden by the strong, collective voices of Bulgarian women folk singers. Then came a collection whose symbolism Kawakubo’s husband Adrian Joffe later translated as: “small can be mighty. She thinks we’re a little bit tired of big business, big culture, and global systems. What about the small things that happen over all continents, everywhere—aren’t they global, that’s not big?”
“A little bit tired”? That was a mild phrase for what we’d just seen. The always heart-in-mouth experience of watching a Comme de Garçons women’s show had just turned out to be a protest against the patriarchy—and by extension the fashion system. That, anyway, is what I read when she opened her show with five different kinds of menswear fabrics: pinstripes, checks, and gray flannels, their grotesque, inhuman 3D shapes standing in as synonyms for the uniforms of salarymen and corporations out of control.
But then, something else started to happen: the fabric of female fashion began to pile on, overlay, infiltrate. Little red and purple cocktail dresses on top of a black base, to start with. Then a big velvet crinoline. Finally, there were many layers of pink, red, and watermelon duchess satin bodices and skirts that looked like some kind of impenetrable couture armored vehicle walking towards us.
Meanwhile, on the sound-track, the recording of the Bulgarian singers—as Joffe later shared—was of “workers in the fields, harvest, families, getting things done together.” Of course this would hold symbolism for Rei Kawakubo and for Joffe about the independence of Comme des Garçons in an increasingly mega-corporation-dominated world. By extension, the everyone-working-together idea is bound into the culture of buying and supporting other young, small, and independent designers, which Kawakubo and Joffe and their teams have nurtured since the opening of the first Dover Street Market, 20 years ago. A lot of emerging talent with radical and important things to say wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s system without DSM.
Hence, the adoration of Kawakubo going on outside. She has often been the Cassandra of fashion, warning of the approaching apocalypse. But now that dystopia is actually upon us, Kawakubo offers hope in the counterfactual of the collective power of the small, banding together to make things lighter, more fun—and more female and frilly. Well, that was my understanding of this season’s Comme rorschach test. The net ruffles and the garlands and petals, the tutus and the conceptual bows eventually took over, and gradually, they won.
