BODYWORKS
The Met’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons
retrospective
is subtitiled Art of the In-Between, which is incorrect. This designer’s work is full-on, more uncompromised than that of any other contemporary fashion designer. There are other brands that subvert (Hood by Air, Namilia), but none with the clarity, assuredness, and innocence (toward media and market) of Kawakubo. More than navigating between polarities of gender, technique and identity, she operates outside these classifications. And her aim is not to to shock, but to make clothes that remain close to her vision.
These clothes are often costume-like, exaggerated versions of everyday pieces: a biker jacket with plum-sized grommets and thick leather laces, a ballet tutu fashioned from s sloping pile of crushed black tulle, a nun’s habit that covers the face completely, a kilt that crushes together four different tartans. And they are playful syntactially, accepting conventions of tailoring and taking them to exponential extremes. There is an A-line dress with the profile of another dress appliqued on top of it, a grey checked suit with an additional set of arms growing from its armpits, and a pleated white gown whose front panel has pleats printed on it.
However inventive these garments are in construction and image, it’s their relationship to the body that’s their boldest achievement. They have a crustacean quality, making an exoskeleton – another body – around the body to give it new form. They are less sewn than constructed, incorporating boning, wire, padding, and industrial materials like vinyl and plastic, to give them an powerful independent structure. They obscure the body and all its powerful identities: race, gender, age, stature, health, beauty, mobility, power.
It’s a tall order wearing the clothes, which require surrendering one’s figure along with one’s social status. At the Met Gala celebrating the show only a handful of celebrities, including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Caroline Kennedy, wore Comme Des Garcons on the red carpet. They didn’t look merely pretty; they looked like warrior princesses from some other, altogether more sophisticated, planet.
Photograph by Nalina Moses.