In the throes of the 400-whatever show marathon, most of us probably give insufficient attention to the point of it all. Sure, most of us have exited a dull show and given the why-did-we-bother eye roll, but that’s different. That’s an optical whine, not serious consideration. Most of us go, machinelike, from show to show to show to show to show, without questioning.
Once in a rare while, something makes us question. What’s it all about? The shows, the process, fashion itself? One role of fashion at its best should be to stir emotion, to make us feel. In the Comme des Garçons collection she showed on Saturday, Rei Kawakubo did so with a power and intimacy rare in this era of see-shoot-Instagram. The designer showed in the Galerie de Minéralogie at the Natural History Museum in an aisle so narrow, two tall people sitting across the runway could practically have played footsie. She called the show “Ceremony of Separation”; the words evoking distance, loss, perhaps death, but also possibly the hopefulness found in moving on.
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To quiet piano music, the models emerged. First out: a girl in a bulbous arrangement of white cotton sheeting, each bunch secured with a big self bow, her black hair stiffened into a mourning veil. The width of her pillowed casing spanned the entire runway, yet before she completed her return stroll, a second model in a padded triangle of equal girth appeared. How would this crossing work? By the two young women stopping, turning, acknowledging each other, each giving the other a little room. This went on throughout the show, moments of actual human engagement on the runway. Talk about news.
The clothes, if one would call them that, were elaborate constructions, some soft, some structured, all out there, most in piles, drapes, wraps of exquisite laces in whites, blacks, a tinge or two of gold. Ridiculous by standard measure — sure; they always are. But even on Kawakubo’s lofty scale, a wonderment pervaded this collection. With her every choice, her fabrics, her configurations, the way she instructed her models, their points of connection, Kawakubo determined to make us feel the beauty and wistfulness of her strangely personal ceremony of loss and progress.
“It was magnificent,” said Simone Rocha, who watched from a standing-room perch. “For me, it’s a privilege to see, it’s totally inspiring. It makes you want to be a designer.” Or if not to be a designer, to revel however briefly in great fashion’s emotive thrall.