On the way out afterward, I mentioned to my colleague that Rei Kawakubo had titled this Comme Des Garçons Hommes Plus collection Black Hole. “Did you know,” she riposted: “that a team of cosmologists and physicists in the UK recently proposed a new theory of the origin of our universe? They hypothesize that instead of stemming from a singularity, as per Big Bang theory, our universe might have formed from within a massive black hole. This means some people now reckon there might be other neighbor universes, in other black holes. And that instead of originating from a mysterious nothing, that theory suggests that our universe was just the most recent event in the ongoing continuation of a cycle.”
This was all too Interstellar to get my head around after two weeks of tailoring, but one thing that did make perfect sense was “the ongoing continuation of a cycle.” Ever since her first show in 1975, Kawakubo has expanded her dark and distinct universe while remaining true to its mysterious point of origin. This latest pulse of seasonal force both returned to and further extended its spirit.
The models wore startled, flyaway wigs and hockey masks reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter’s. Their bodies were further orbited by ravishing fabric satellites whose own points of origin were immediately identifiable as conventional tailoring, yet whose cut and embellishments spoke of much more unconventional creative accretions. Black tail coats in crushed velvet or shiny wool nylon were pocked with shirred craters of ruffle at the collar. Sometimes the tails were split into strips. Zipped dungarees in a gray check featured full legs narrowly cuffed from mid-calf to angle, and were worn under jackets whose yokes folded with a mobius twist back into themselves, leaving the back open and the structure of the inner pockets exposed at each hip.
“My energy comes from freedom,” an ongoing Comme motto, was painted in urgent white lettering on black polished detached-upper shoes. Kawakubo bent her universe to her will, cropping jackets, folding them in on themselves as wearable wormholes, or atomizing their surfaces into dark and flouncy chaos. A snake print Lurex jacquard (it looked like) was creatively shed as a newly evolved second skin as a jacket with two inner layers and two sets of lapels worn above shorts with diagonally slanted hems. One of those opened-backed jackets was presented with its cut-out shrouded in lace: “Sexy Comme!” another less high-minded colleague noted.
The collection closed with a blinding flash of contrast. The long procession of black looks with their occasional sliver of gray punctuations was suddenly eclipsed by a closing array of white. This featured more cosmic suiting whose cratered surfaces formed primitive and elemental contrasts with a white dress as shaggily alarmed as any of Kawakubo’s wigs.
