On the surface they seem to have nothing in common. For the 25th spring/summer line of Comme des Garcons, the Japanese avant-garde designer Rei Kawakubo evoked a postmodern-slash-belle epoque sensibility with white and cream ruffled petticoats, heavily textured pleated skirts that resembled lampshades and layer upon layer of rough-hewn fabric barely joined together with the thinnest of threads and the fewest of clasps.
By contrast, the young Belgian Martin Margiela conceived of a collection so utterly sleek, black, minimally shaped and smoothly hemmed you might mistake some of the pieces, when hung, for garment bags. So why did the two renegade designers show their spring lines together in Paris?
“A shared vision, a mutual respect and a wish to seek other stimuli in the presentation of our work to the professionals of our industry,” says Margiela, a longtime fan of Kawakubo. When news of this first fashion double bill was announced, industry insiders pondered how the two deconstructionists were going to collaborate. But when the show got into full swing at the Conciergerie, an imposing Gothic structure and former prison where Marie Antoinette spent her last days, it was clear that the “shared vision” was more of a process than an end result.
Margiela’s theme of garments that can lay perfectly level like pancakes gives new meaning to the word “flatware.” For his jackets, he displaced shoulder lines and sleeves to the front. For his tops, he borrowed industrial patterns used for grocery bags and photo-screened images such as a folded, button-down shirt onto the top half of them, further playing with the notion of two-dimensionality and surface.
Pants featured full-length side zippers that allowed them to be opened totally and laid flat, and collars on T-shirts appeared more like vertical slits along the front rather than a hole for the neck.
To further drive home his point for his theme, Margiela had men dressed in white lab coats (the house’s actual work uniform) walk around with the garments displayed on hangers rather than use models. Perhaps the bag reference is a wink at the fact that Margiela has been selected as the new house designer for chic bag-maker Hermes.
Whatever the nature of his experiment, the masterful tailor somehow designed a line that is eminently urban and wearable.
“It’s not about crazy clothes that you can’t wear. His clothes can be worn by any age group, day or night,” says Marilyn Blaszka, co-owner of Blake, a Lincoln Park boutique that has been carrying Margiela since his third season.
“It’s not only for a fashion- or label-conscious crowd. People seem to respond on an individual basis. Older women respond to the fine tailoring. Younger people respond to his new ideas.”
Among Margiela’s most loyal customers in Chicago are artists and arts-related people, architects and a psychiatrist, says Blaszka.
You would also have to appreciate construction, conception and the subconscious to be a dedicated follower of Comme des Garons’ fashions.
For a designer who pioneered the minimal, black, androgynous look and whose signature ’80s asymmetrical hem and offset waists can now be seen on the runways of designers such as Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Jil Sander, to name a few, Kawakubo has hit an all-time super-feminine high this season. She appropriately explored the fin de siecle frilliness of the 1890s just in time for this millennium, but you wouldn’t exactly call her derivative.
Perhaps as an extension of her “lumps-and-bumps” collection from last spring (which she adopted for Merce Cunningham’s ballet “Scenario”), Kawakubo continued to challenge the female form with buckling skirts, inside-out seams and 6-foot-long stockings that bunched at the ankles. She christened this look “Clustered Beauty.”
“There is beauty in the unfinished,” says Kawakubo of her raw-edged, layered dresses. “The very fact of something being unfinished gives it more a feeling of something projecting ahead into the future.”
Chastised for being more conceptual than practical, Kawakubo says she is never concerned with how wearable her clothes are, but whether they succeed in redefining beauty. She would like to see people wearing fashion just because it’s bold and it looks good, rather than for its mere function as clothing.
If Kawakubo’s fluttering creations and Margiela’s static “flatware” are indications of the shapes of things to come, perhaps they are signs of the wide range of possibilities fashion can present when freed from the constraints of function, even natural form, and allowed to flourish on its own aesthetic terms.
