The music cut out after only 16 all-black looks. Although each of them contained more technical complexity and visual surprise than is sometimes found in entire collections elsewhere, this still felt brief. There was a moment of pause. Then from backstage came a cluster of six looks, all of them versions of a look that had come before, but this time in the cutsiest, most saccharine of pinks.
These huge and stately abstract envelopments, so broad of beam that the models had to step aside for each other when crossing over on the narrow runway, were sent out so close together that it was a challenge for the photographers to get full shots. The room stayed swathed hotly in silence. Only when the cluster had retreated backstage did the sound system fire up again with Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor.”
This pink interlude was mildly surprising for those of us who had been slipped a copy of Rei Kawakubo’s note for the season before the show. It read: “In the end, there is black. Ultimately Black. I have come to realize that, after all, black is the color for me. It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the color that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: The Universe and the Black Hole.” Comme-pletists, however, would recall that during January’s menswear show, titled Black Hole, Kawakubo closed with a semi-similar blast of all-white looks. The inky darkness of the universe seems even darker in contrast.
Compared to last season’s classically Brutalist Comme womenswear, all thick brushstrokes, today’s architecture worked on another contrast: inserting detail into that darkness. Shirring, ruching, layering, the odd scrunch of tulle and a spidery trail of embroidery all textured the surface of Kawakubo’s typically massive pieces.
These pieces were so abstract of form that they allowed you to project whatever you saw in them onto them. Did the curved panels of padding at the bosom, skirt, and shoulder of Look 6 resemble Mediterranean terra-cotta tiles or British judges’ wigs? Were the marvelous fronds of fringe that made the closing look shiver with each twitch of movement in the final look more akin to jellyfish or a meteor storm of ion tails? As so often at Comme des Garçons, this show was about generating questions.
