114: COMME DES GARÇONS A SPACE BETWEEN BEING AND BECOMING.
A contemplation of Comme Des Garçons Homme Plus Spring Summer 2026 show - PARIS.
Look 6: Comme Des Garçons Homme Plus, Spring Summer 2026, Friday 27 June 2025.
There is a palpable sense of discovery while watching work by Rei Kawakubo, presented for the first time. To witness the release of identity clothed as real, formed into focus, as a mirror held high to a future which echoes a past in a holding space ahead of time. A mirror held by one pair of hands.
This new view manages to override and detect what cannot be forged or replicated, continuing a personal process which tangibly defies a modern age fear within an industry nervous of its future - how to create an AI-proof creative system - And yet I doubt if this was the intention or care for Kawakubo, whose methodologies to create actively interrogates the artificial and the intellectual.
And yet this codex of visual facets both provokes a want to decipher while also remaining ambivalent to such cues - a work with its own a soul, which seems to shrug off any such need to be understood. As the presentation concludes, the lights switch off, I detect there are no questions for a body of work that seems so complete. To begin to pull at these conceptual threads somehow seems to undermine the work’s purpose and personal objective, more therapy of understanding than a need to be understood.
It is within this sixth sense that the work lives first (a title for the archival publications the brand offered its customers within its stores in the late 1980s). This sense of instinct becomes even more pronounced when seeing works move, as if freshly hatched - live - as alter egos birthed within a need for survival - a procession of visual signals made from provocation of noise.
A juxtaposition of subcultures celebrated within one identity - Within the superfine tailoring of Harlem Dandies, Noh Theatre and Barbara Hulanickis’s Biba - erudite suiting spliced with memories of silhouettes - Edwardian childlike proportions and mid-century Teddy Boys. Narrow-shouldered coats cut with lapels wide and padded as vampiric gothic - tails undulating new-look volume, paired with zippered drain pipe trousers and thick soled creepers. A thrown-out rule book of Saville Row - arrived overprinted with a micro geometry of flocked op-art, part Warholian screen print, part symbolic Japanese tessellation - all somehow via Lagos. Expansive lapels appear padded as to protect - piratical and slashed as with the tip of Fontana's blade, as the layering of codes denoting far-reaching subcultures meld.
The presentation arrives without hesitation of conviction, and in so doing, is ceremonial in charge. An exacting sense, read from afar - where silhouettes are immediately identifiable as being the work of Kawakubo, sometimes brazenly so and yet, in contrast, the details, up close, delight with restraint, made with a level of care as to indicate a camaraderie of craftspeople. The contradiction of clashing energies of references, at times actively jar to inflict echoes of British punk and yet are underpinned with a tenderness of line which are graceful in poise, gestural in elegance, indicative of an emotive balance between being and becoming, mirrored in the model casting of late adolescence. The name Comme des Garçons feels ever prevalent when viewing the work, that ease and distance that certain boys have, unconscious of judgement, curious with their instinctive choices - forever youthful, forever within that space between.
A fascinating sense of positioning within time was actively engaged with, both historically within the visual references of specific silhouettes and fabrications, which act as a metaphor. Within a palpable sense of pulling and cutting from the very fibre of a time not yet experienced - an unfathomable uncertainty that belongs to the subconscious mystery of instinct. In the mystery of fear as provocation to identify, in the hope for another way and in another chance to live.
Comme Des Garçons Homme Plus, Spring Summer 2026.
Thank you Thomas Alsop.