March 3, 2019 |
For autumn, nipped and contorted silhouettes and very strange shapes: shall we call it “bodytecture”? It’s what Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons does best – she is the best. The show got stranger and more beautiful: rounded and bulbous shoulder lines and attachments with bulky hips; a jacket had two arms. There were rubber chaps: wide and odd. In parts, the clothes looked medieval, too. A piece of headgear looked like a knight’s chainmail coif but this Comme version came in wool. An over-jacket, perhaps it was a vest, came attached on the back with two Sunday School coat hangers sprayed gold and a gold cherub.
Later in the show, models appeared to be in some kind of catwalk face-off. One model approached another then stopped. Then both turned and walked away. Were they chess pieces? Was this a game of chess? Was that dress shaped like a Bishop? Was she the Queen? And you two rooks?The music was a black marriage between Sunday School hymns (All things Bright and Beautiful) and something darker and satanic. At the end the lights went out. And the models walked back in. Then the lights came on and the models stood in a circle and looked up to the ceiling. To whom? What did it mean? A press release after the show said: ‘The Gathering of Shadows: many small shadows come together to make one powerful thing’.
Photographs by Jason-Lloyd Evans.
