On Saturday, in the bowels of Le Centorial, the 19th-century building that is the headquarters of the bank formerly known as Crédit Lyonnais, two floors below the soaring central hall, so far underground that cellphones go dark, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons held a history lesson.
“Have you ever wondered what an 18th-century punk would look like?” Ms. Kawakubo’s husband, Adrian Joffe, asked before the show. Mr. Joffe also happens to be president of Comme des Garçons International and the conduit of his wife’s oracular explanations. “You’re about to find out.”
It began with rose festooned damask and pastoral jacquards, shaped into garlands that wreathed the body, and boned corsetry and panniers reimagined as armadillo-like scales, sliced into articulated armor on the arms and legs. Leather breastplates brushed with pastel blooms became a bristling carapace (and so did petal pink vinyl), and nylon saddle bags in fuchsia and fire opal melted into giant hexagonal mouths, like a carnivorous lily. If Marie Antoinette had wanted to play samurai warrior at her Versailles faux farm instead of milkmaid, this would have been what she would wear.
Except that Ms. Kawakubo’s work has never been about dress-up, despite her having little or no interest in putting on the runway what most people would characterize as regular clothes. It has to do, rather, with drawing unexpected but powerful connections in entirely visceral ways via the stuff that covers the body. Which, in this case, had to do with a reminder of a time that was “all about revolution,” said Mr. Joffe: the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.
A time when, in other words, the 99 percent rose up against the 1 percent and machines changed the world economy. Recognize the pattern? Those who don’t learn from history, etc.
Paris was full of teachable moments over the weekend. Sometimes they were as simple as Haider Ackermann’s continued refinement of his own point of view, this time with a silhouette sharp and thin as a straight razor — cropped legging-like trousers, striped like a tuxedo pant or two-tone, front and back — plus a square-shouldered military coat, sweeping or cropped no matter, doused in jewel-tones of ruby, emerald and gold. Or Guillaume Henry’s ability to learn from his own mistakes at Nina Ricci, and abandon transparent styling tricks for smudgy seduction in a “sporty bourgeois,” Romy Schneider-inspired show of lace and crushed-velvet slipdresses, key-hole slinks, and pencil skirts and organza tops under eelskin trench coats. (It was more worthy of study, anyway, than Fausto Puglisi’s leopard-meets-chrysanthemum empty femininity at Emanuel Ungaro.)
Sometimes they were more abstract, as in Phoebe Philo’s primer at Céline on the importance of curiosity and “finding the possibilities” — in wardrobes, fabrics, “life in general” (her words, backstage after the show). Which in this case meant flared jersey trousers that swished with a step under almost everything: oversize shirts with pointy piped collars and sleeveless trench coats; skinny nylon tunics stretched long and silver screen satins knotted on a hip; and balloon bouclés. You never know what rules deserve to be broken, and what goes with what, until you try. In the awkwardness and angst of odd pairings, new ideas arise.
And sometimes they were interdisciplinary, as in Junya Watanabe’s dazzling three-dimensional exploration of Euclidean geometry and the functional application of sacred mathematics to everyday form. Who needs a ruffle when they can have a polyhedron?
On a simple black leotard base, under black bathing caps, he used what looked like squishy neoprene but turned out to be an industrial fabric made from polyurethane bonded to nylon (who knew?) that was cut and folded and otherwise formed it into honeycombed tunics and skirts hipped in hexagonal origami; tops that resembled Escher staircases and dresses that undulated in waves over the torso. The effect was of a problem, elegantly solved.
Coincidentally, Yohji Yamamoto also had math on the mind, titling his show “Subtraction,” and stripping away extraneous color and decoration, the better to create his own equation: long, precisely cut coats and dresses with spiky lapels, sailor collars and the occasional splash of graffiti for emphasis.
But it was Jun Takahashi at Undercover who added poetry to the syllabus. (Sorry: schedule.) To the tune of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” he celebrated comfort dressing (fuzzy bedroom slippers and bathrobe coats, silk pajama sets and warm tweeds) as well as women in all their forms, from youth to retirement age, portraits to priestesses. Though whether the implication was that said women deserve comfort or provide it was unclear. The answer is probably both. (It should be.)
They came with their own pillow handbags, sporting giant stuffed bugs as brooches, and crowned by golden antlers. They came in a gold breastplate (this is, bizarrely, something of a thing this season) over a billowing evening gown or the most homespun of knits, the sort a clan grandmother might make, or enveloped in a faux fur sweatsuit, giant striped scarves trailing behind like a train. And in every incarnation, they looked like royalty — of the most democratic kind.
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN
Source New York Times
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