It’s not often that fashion show notes, the word salads that purport to explain the idea behind a collection but often seem like a pointless justification, offer a gut punch of surprise. But that’s what happened after the Comme des Garçons show, when Rei Kawakubo issued her usual explanatory aphorism.
“Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,” it read. But — there was an addendum — “Small can be mighty.”
For anyone following the news every day, it was impossible not to know what Ms. Kawakubo meant. Seeing her show, it was also hard not to think: Yeah! After all, she was not making a point about miniskirts.
Instead, what came through in her amalgamations of classic fabrics — pinstripe wools, gingham, tartan, jewel-toned velvets — made into what reassembled dresses, or at least dress-adjacent structures, was their human scale.
Each odd, striking piece stood on its own: a shift emerging from the labyrinth of material here, a jacket from the mille-feuille there; a pyramid of black and white tuxedo ruffles, like the upended skirts of a ball gown, sandwiching the person inside, turning her into a monument to dressing gone by. Each one was like a little stack of memories, caught in the process of morphing into something else. What would it be? Who knows.
With them came emotion. Not necessarily desire, but tenderness. And the pure pleasure of seeing creativity let loose to roam, at a time when fashion often resembles a cynical exercise, controlled by big groups.
The show was only 20 looks. Their power lay not in their shoulders or their logos or their bombast, but their ability to get under your skin and push on the soft places. To make you feel, and not just think, or raise your eyebrows, or yawn. That’s rare enough to seem like a radical experience, but it has happened a few times this week.
It happened, for example, at Rick Owens, whose world-building can tend toward the extreme, but who reined in himself — and his soaring shoulders, leaving behind the smoke machines of many other seasons to, as he said in a preview, “remind everybody that all of my proposals are real.” It was a reaction, he said, to “looking around and seeing this kind of ostentatious festival of fashion in which we live.”
It’s as weird to hear Mr. Owens discussing the need to make “plausible” clothes as it is to think of Ms. Kawakubo saying “small.” (“Even I might roll my eyes at me,” Mr. Owens said, laughing.) But the truth is his long bias-cut skirts, collaged together from denim and wool and slit up the center to swirl around the legs; his suede and leather jackets, with their air of desiccated royalty, are simply elegant.
As was a hoodie pieced together from hundreds of strips of some shiny fabric so it resembled feathers and an evening dress woven from strips of leather that looked both ancient and otherworldly — and wearable. Mr. Owens’ clothes can read as aggressive, but they also offer their own kind of embrace.
Still, perhaps no collection was as purely moving as the Undercover show from Jun Takahashi. Created to mark the brand’s 35th anniversary, it was ostensibly a revisiting of what Mr. Takahashi called his own favorite collection, from fall 2004, which had been inspired by Patti Smith and the work of the French “plush” artist Anne-Valerie Dupond. (Yeah, it was hard to know what to make of that combination of references.)
No matter; it actually featured models of all ages wandering aimlessly around the show space in what seemed like random patterns. Just as the buttons on their sweaters and Champion sweatshirts wandered off-center, meandering through a forest of found objects that decorated their hems: keepsakes and shiny trinkets, like the rescued contents of a treasure chest, that dangled like charms.
A black coat was finished in onyx tinsel and made to be misbuttoned. Puffer party dresses had teddy bear heads quilted into their skirts, as if they were the Easter Island version of F. A. O. Schwarz cuddle toys. Everything was sort of squishy, in a good way; complex and utterly casual at the same time.
At the end, a model came out in an ivory cotton suit, soft as a blanket, long fabric feathers trimming her arms. They were transformed into wings when she put her hands in her pockets. And when she gave a little shrug, as if to say, “What’s the big deal?” or “Can you believe this is going on?” the movement of her dorsal muscles made her wings flap. Back and forth, back and forth, as if getting ready for liftoff.
In that tiny gesture, whole stories lie.
