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Comme des Garçons / Fall 2012 RTW

by Sarah Mower – March 4th, 2012

It’s hard to write about Rei Kawakubo’s fall collection without sounding pretentious. But the thunderous, ten-minute round of applause which ended her show—people were clapping until their hands were sore, and then some started stamping their feet—is proof of the overwhelming gratitude the audience felt for seeing her raise the endeavor of fashion onto a different plane. This season she was working an extended essay in flat, oversize shapes, and pure, lovely color, and pattern. “Two dimensions are the future” were the only enigmatic words she had for it. There’s no real point in trying to fathom what she meant by that. “I don’t know,” said her husband, Adrian Joffe, afterward. “She is just always trying to do something with clothes which hasn’t been done before.”

Not quite knowing what you were seeing was part of the delight, an experience which threw the audience into a rare state of purely visual response, where the usual foreground preoccupations about message, wearability, and trends dropped away, and the brain clicked onto a trancelike level of just looking. At first it seemed to be an exercise in beautiful, solid color—red, pink, lavender, cerulean blue—saturating huge, seamless shapes which were placed onto the body almost like abstract pieces of flat garment patterns, with seam allowances left in. Coats, jackets, and jodhpurs in some dense, pressed, apparently felted fabric were free of any fastenings; the silhouettes extended beyond the boundaries of the body, and the sleeves hung behind curviform skirts.

Then, pattern began to appear: graphic jigsaws of camouflage, leopard spots, polka dots, and checkerboards, graffitied over with flowers. Somewhere in the middle, chintzy roses emerged as well as a group of models who were smothered in floral prints, masks, hoods and all. They were followed by prints of a different kind, where the outline of a “normal-size” dress would be placed in the center of a giant coat, followed by squiggly cloudlike forms, which then transferred themselves into pink-and-blue collaged cutouts.

The emotional reaction to taking all this in went somewhere deeper than the intellectual. It called up a sense of childlike freedom and enjoyment—memories, maybe, of spontaneous preschool play with fuzzy felt shapes, paper cutouts, and the paintbox. At another level—the knowing one, where the fashion eye is on the lookout for links with other current dialogues—it connected up with the exuberant, oversize shapes and nutty, body-obliterating forms seen at Marc Jacobs and in some of the young designers’ shows in London. Rei Kawakubo, on her separate plane of creativity, took it all into the realms of an art experience. It was heartwarming and pure and offered as uplifting a pleasure as anything fashion has seen this winter. And there’s nothing at all pretentious about that.