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The call back to antiquated neo-gothic inspired romanticism on the runway and in cinema has been long and loud the last few years, and yet, it has been marked by an inescapable air of cos-play and dress-up that feels more costumey than contemporary- less artfully referenced and more like trend-veiled re-enactment. The homage to dark baroque, Victorian and 18th century boudoir, ballroom and royal court fashions, has felt cheaply forced and underwhelming despite the rococo of it all. Somewhere in the blockbuster and runway reinterpretations of these styles, cinema and fashion has landed on a YA fantasy daydream-scape, relying on superficially macabre ornamentation and endless corsetry to convey the devastating romance of such beautiful and physically circonscribing garments- effectively losing the ability to artfully and subtly deconstruct and reconstruct these inspirations.
But this week at the Comme des Garçons F/W26 women’s show- we can all thank Rei Kawakubo (again) for finally breathing a fresh breath of true avant-garde air to the genre. Somehow, in her massive, imposing, explosions of texture and form- in her sculptures that we call dresses- Kawakubo imposes more subtle grace to the neo-gothic-romantic cannon, artfully and subtly deconstructing and reconstructing these inspirations in her enormous pieces in such a way that finally feels just.
In her own words, Kawakubo goes back to black, in this latest collection- inevitably and always back to black. Hip extenders that jut out across the width of the tiny runway. Massive ballooning organza, lace, brocade, and ample festoon draping. The model’s hair is spun like cotton candy, protruding into arbitrary columns and nests. Halfway through the show, the music stops and six pink, distinctively more feminine looks interrupt the black runway, presented in silence, perhaps the same silence that filled the room when Marie Antoinette said Let them eat cake.
The female form is rendered bulbous, definitively grotesque, and yet unfalteringly sumptuous- the oppressive grandeur of it all so faithfully captured and heightened by Kawakubo’s masterful sculptural language.
Writing about Comme des Garçons the way we’d write about any other show feels distinctly reductive- Kawakubo runs laps around fashion week, reinforcing not the artistry of fashion but defining the absolute art of it.
