Jurassic park

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus FW18
By Kinza Shenn | Fashion | 20 January 2018

The models at the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus walked out wearing dinosaur masks, sewn out of sailcloth by artist Shimoda Masakatsu. They were big, and cushioned, and kind of sweet-looking – as much as one can be. Masakatsu is an expert in dinosaur masks; he has photo book, Kyōryū Ningen, where children are pictured enshrouded by the masks’ size and weight, and printed beside poems by Shuntaro Tanikawa, giving melancholic notes on childhood.

It’s an easier route to come at Rei Kawakubo’s brilliantly opaque work through her collaborators’ translations. She imparted a few words on the collection, ‘inner rebel’ and ‘White Shock’. Take both as reflections on our social landscape as you will. Punk has always been the heart of the brand. In any case, Kawakubo doesn’t answer questions with her work, she asks them, and leaves them hanging (in that way, isn’t a review of a CDG collection always more telling about its writer, than of Ms Kawakubo?) It’s the kachikan of Comme des Garçons, or its reason of being, of sorts: trying to find something that doesn’t yet exist. That felt in mood with the collection here, a blur of surrealistic codes and details wanting for dream analysis.

The models were styled with neatly middle-parted ponytails, often the colours of sweets. With streaks of shimmering lurex, tailoring was patchworked together and patterned with camouflage, bricks, rocks, the building blocks of a boy’s imagination. Comic book motifs appeared too, Golden Age-looking from a glance, they had a faded-looking tonality like from the sun, or attic worn. Maybe the subject wasn’t the young shōnen after all, maybe he’s a man now, in dream and in memory, revisiting dusty fragments of what’s left.

GALLERYCatwalk images from Comme des Garçons Homme Plus FW18





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