Rei Kawakubo autumn/winter offering for Comme des Garcons at this weeks Paris Fashion Week was an arsenal of everyday extraordinary. The show was much more then a catwalk, instead an intimate performance exploring the solemnity of terminal loss. Kawakubo wanted to explore ‘the clothes you wear when you see someone off, who has passed away and what the would wear also’. Models glacially walked down the narrow catwalk to the icey symphonies of Max Ritcher with their hair entangled with the spidery legs of black head pieces. The wiry pieces seeping across their faces, melting the features into a black oily void.
The theatrical and daring designs appeared to be erupting from the sauntering bodies of the models, the shape of the clothes lingering long after the models have passed. The designs were reminiscent of everyday objects. Pillows of cotton noosed with bows that cascaded in deflated puffs across the body resembled crumpled bed sheets. Swirling cagey sculptures which riveted around the neck, shoulder and lower torso, although daubed in delicate lace, gave the feeling of a boxed in claustrophobia.
Big, bold,brutalist esque dresses which appeared to resemble doors and windows was perhaps Kawakubo nodding to the notion of entrances to the soul. This human soul which seem weighted down by the heavy fabrics of the show, a metaphor for the heaviness of loss and perhaps the heaviness of our material dependence in general. The material demands of the everyday physically spawning out of the body, becoming part of the model and blotting out the humanity, the realness of life.
