Comme des Garçons spring—summer 1997. For two seasons now she has presented her collect

Comme des Garçons spring—summer 1997. For two seasons now she has presented her collection away from what she describes as the ‘circus’ that is the official show schedule. She shows to a select group  of people who she hopes will be sympathetic, or at least open, to her ideas. (It’s worth noting that, since she made this decision, more than a handful of other designers have followed suit). In the immense and sombre Musée d’Art d’Afrique et d’Oceanie, no more than 300 privileged fashion pundits were asked to form a square for this purpose. There was no catwalk. No music. The lights went up — no sunglasses required. As the first model came into view, the only things that detracted from the clothes were the whirring of the cameras and her light-as-a-feather footsteps. You could have heard a pin drop.  Viewed from the front, the slender, ankle-length dress — in pure white stretch organza with fragile cape shoulders — looked like nothing so very out of the ordinary. From behind, however, two small, kidney-shaped protuberances, positioned at the shoulder-blades like angels’ wings, suggested more radical things to come. Sure enough, as the show progressed, one model after another came out with increasingly stranger, larger swellings, all under long, skinny, semi-sheer dresses — in either red, white or blue, or in winsome ginghams and gentle, fondant-coloured prints. There were lopsides bustles, misshapen padded hips and collar bones, fat snakes coiling round waist and rib cages, and even — there is no other word for them — humps, all gracing elegant and very narrow silhouettes. Dramatic contrast came in the form of waxed, brown-paper puffball skirts and feather-light tops — pleated elaborately into Prince of Wales check, gathered into a fragile flower at the waist or pressed into myriad folds until they looked like living coral or anemones — all cut from over-sized spheres of fabric out of which limbs, necks and torsos sprouted like the stems of tropical blooms.  While the audience marvelled at the beauty of this less radical side of the show, the more extreme elements left them lost for words. Some giggled nervously (and not entirely charitably); more thought that, this time, Kawakubo had just gone too far. Few onlookers could fathom this latest offering — Quasimodo jokes filled the fashion pages of the following day’s papers, and it was rumoured that one of Britain’s most visionary buyers took up smoking on the spot, such was the strain on even her hithero Comme-friendly sensibilities. Those still in tune with such radical sensibilities, however, were in raptures — this was art, living sculpture, Kawakubo’s most powerful collection for years. -- source link

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