I am honestly not a big fan of Comme des Garcons - Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe create innovative works of art, but I like my clothes to be comfortable and wearable - I like when I don't notice my clothing because it isn't restricting my movement in any way.
That being said, the CDG Fall 2009 collection has (retroactively) blown my mind. This fall, I went to Barneys to creepily peruse/touch/lust over the fifth floor ready-to-wear stuff, and I saw some of the blanket-coats while I was hysterically trying on Rodarte. I remember not liking the design, because the coats over the blankets frequently ended at awkward lengths, with the ballooning fabric of the blankets resulting in an awkwardly pregnant-like silhouette (part of this neurosis around fit comes from my having a larger-than-usual chest. Girls with A cups can wear anything and look cool-cute. Girls with C cups risk looking pornish, cheesy, awkward, and a whole host of other bad adjectives).
After reading this article by Robin Givhan of the Washington Post, my whole outlook on the collection changed. Givhan uses an anecdote about a homeless woman she saw begging during the Paris shows, and astutely connects it to Kawakubo's intentions when creating this characteristically inscrutable collection. Givhan's observation is spot on. Although I would have never associated homelessness with high fashion, particularly because the more obvious sensory aspects of it are removed in a runway context (let's face it, eau de Colt 45 and Crack-Cocaine wouldn't sell very well), the bundled coats, bare-foot-painted shoes, and swaddled-kiss face coverings of CDG's show are distinctly homeless-inspired. I can't really summarize the genius of this collection or its review: reading and viewing both is required to really get them.
Fashion is rarely successfully intellectual, but Kawakubo's collection makes an adept portrayal of the hypocrisy of a society where fashion shows can coexist with those begging to survive.
*photo courtesy of Style.com
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