Rituals of Disruption: Rei Kawakubo’s Radical Reinvention of the Suit at Comme des Garçons Homme Plus S/S26”

Hair and Make-up: Takeo Arai @hmaraitakeo

Head pieces: HIZUME @hizume.official

Music curation: ADC 303 @adc303

Lighting : Thierry Dreyfus

Dear Shaded Viewers,

The Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Spring/Summer 2026 collection, titled “Not Suits, But Suits,” presented by Rei Kawakubo at Paris Fashion Week, is a radical redefinition of menswear tailoring that challenges and deconstructs the traditional suit with bold innovation and theatricality.

Kawakubo’s vision strips the suit of its conventional rigidity, transforming it into a dynamic, almost sculptural form. The collection features exaggerated hips, panniered shapes, and layered volumes that distort the silhouette, replacing corporate polish with a sense of mutation and armor-like protection. Jackets appear cut apart and reassembled, with padded, high-contrast lapels on cropped tuxedo jackets adding a cartoonish yet elegant flair. Slim trousers incorporate concealed zippers that allow them to expand into ruffled, skirt-like shapes, blending tailoring with soft sculpture.

Color plays a key role, with candy-hued floral jackets ruffled at the hemline or bulging at the hips injecting a playful, almost subversive “flower power” into the traditionally austere suit. Knitwear is torn and restructured, layered over pleated shirts, kilts, and shorts, creating a deliberate tension between chaos and order. Accessories such as oversized multi-brimmed newsboy caps made from suit materials and long braided wigs add an unsettling, almost shamanistic presence, reinforcing Kawakubo’s statement that “we would really need to get someone powerful like a shaman to come to us to lead us to peace, love and fraternity”.

Presented in a stifling concrete space that amplified the collection’s atmosphere of friction and transformation, the show was less about formalwear as a uniform of conformity and more about clothing as a medium for disruption, ritual, and emotional expression. Kawakubo’s Homme Plus collection is a ceremony of tailoring dismantled and rebuilt, insisting on evolution through pressure rather than mere progression

Rei Kawakubo’s relentless innovation in menswear, pushes the boundaries of what a suit can be—no longer a symbol of corporate uniformity but a canvas for individuality, resistance, and poetic transformation.

Later,

Diane