“I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from the damaging of perfect things,” disclosed Rei Kawakubo in her traditional mood-note this season. To understand what she might be getting at, or to at least venture a line of speculation, demanded you join the Comme-gregation at this afternoon’s service of hushed and reverent runway regard.
Kawakubo was drawing big abstract shapes in gestural dressmaking, and the fabrics were her palette. It seemed the “perfect things” she might be “damaging” through her design were both our expectations of the materials, via their unconventional manipulation and use, and also Kawakubo’s own back catalogue of sculptural abstraction. It was Comme-core: the opening undulating undyed cotton shell and its contrasting front of something scarlet and satin-y resembled a burst seed pod or cocoon whose contrasting colors emphasized a tension between exterior and interior. Similarly-ish, the lumpily contoured second garment, in that red again but this time caged within a pink lattice, seemed to be straining against itself.
A piece in coarse-looking canvas was built in jumbled layers of gathered ruffles with raw edges that became more compacted and densely pressed as they passed down the body within them. Deconstructed swathes of white brocade, lace and jacquard were placed within human-set landscapes of more canvas and jute. The horsehair-ish neck-pillow wig extensions worn by the models sometimes recalled awry upholstery, while the tied padded sheets and heaped pillow-like structures in looks near the finale recalled the meaningful disarray of Tracey Emin’s My Bed. A look made in a layered double-cone of padded fabric tubes, white but hemmed in red, and a look patched from vaguely pelvic shaped pillows, were both topped with those wigs and also sheer bundles of more bundled fabric: everything was packed in together.
For almost 15 minutes the only noise was coughing, camera shutters, and the scrape of an especially tall, stiffened burlap hat that brushed the underside of a concrete supporting beam as the model in it mooched past. Then the lights went down, and the applause rang out.
