Do you use fashion to improve your mood or to reflect how you really feel deep down?
At her Comme des Garçons show on Saturday, Rei Kawakubo didn't sugarcoat her message: “This collection is about my current state of mind. “I have anger against everything in the world, especially myself,” she said in a provided statement.
Their fascinating show unfolded like a play, each model in a bright, blackened Marie Antoinette-style outfit, and several representing various approaches to anger management. One stopped in the middle of the track and threw a tantrum, snorting and stomping. Several models went out of their way to confront random guests in the front row, pressing their faces or their puffy, bow-adorned skirts toward them. Another succumbed to her flight instinct, but she eventually returned to complete the circuit.
The clothing was imposing in scale and construction: crude box shapes held together with industrial zippers and stacked on the body; saddlebag skirts in black faux leather trimmed with roughly knotted bows; large coats with wrinkled surfaces, like blisters, or with protruding vertical fins that from afar resembled razor blades.
Some of the black surfaces were printed with barbed wire or chain motifs, but others were stamped with anemone flowers or coiled into large rosettes.
It seems that anger does not exclude some romance and a dose of ostentation. A furry cape and skirt fringe was trimmed with silver lurex threads, and a dense jacquard, shiny like wet tar, was chosen for an off-center jacket open to accommodate the enormous skirt underneath.
Marge Simpson's high hairstyles forced some models to put aside their anger for a moment and duck their heads under the hot spotlights hanging over the catwalk. A piano, played by Beethoven a little angrily, accompanied her melodious walks down the catwalk.
As is her custom, Kawakubo did not come out to take a bow on the catwalk and remained backstage, silently fuming. But her final look was another blistered coat, but in shimmering white and with pretty grosgrain ribbons and little bunches of tulle hanging down, suggesting, perhaps, a move away from the taciturn.
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