The Japanese designer’s pointedly eccentric clothing, the subject of an exhibition at the Met, makes a surprisingly tender statement about women’s bodies.
Helen Lasichanh, the wife of the musician Pharrell Williams, made her arrival at the Met Gala this past week seemingly bedecked in Design Within Reach. Her suit, in two shades of red, boasted inflated tights and hips and exaggerated shoulder pads, like one might find on a coat of armor. Most strikingly, the suit had no arm holes, giving the appearance of having swallowed its wearer whole. Online commentators had their expected field day, comparing Lasichanh to all sorts of couches and chairs. Teletubbies were invoked, too.
Yet those mocking the outfit are themselves missing the joke. Lasichanh’s suit—audacious, and, yes, very funny—is the work of Rei Kawakubo, the mischievous Japanese designer behind the line Comme des Garçons, whose outlandish designs are currently on view at the Met’s Costume Institute. The understated titan of avant-garde fashion is best-known for bulbous designs that on first look appear to share more with museum sculptures than with traditional dresses and trousers. Since her first show in Paris in the early’ 80s, Kawakubo has subverted norms of the body and of design. To ridicule her clothes for their eccentricity is akin to making fun of Pee-wee Herman for his nerdiness.
The designer has long been alternately hailed as an innovator and demonized for creating aggressively unattractive clothing that is out-of-step with its time. From cocoon dresses with no waistline to sweaters full of holes to oddly shaped dresses, Kawakubo has been responsible for radical reconsiderations of the silhouette through experimental pattern-making, draping, knotting, and eventually the use of padding. This sense of out-of-step–ness is evident in the Costume Institute’s spring show. Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between is a cerebral exhibition, serving as a surprisingly timely reminder of the need to embrace bodily differences and vulnerabilities.
Remarkably, Kawakubo is only the second living designer to have a solo show at the Met (the first was Yves Saint Laurent in 1983) . Decades before attaining iconic status, the designer made waves in the early’ 80s by showing austere black or monochromatic garments that engulfed the body—a sharp contrast to the prevailing aesthetic of the time, in which clothing tightly hugged its (preferably gym-fit) wearer. Coupled with her use of “humbler” material such as plain cotton or felted woolen, Kawakubo’s work was a poke in the eye to the hypersexualized opulence of the Reagan era, with its saturated palette, gilded brocades, and plush velvets. Kawakubo was famously hailed as the foremother of deconstruction fashion, a style that the always astute New York Times fashion critic Amy Spindler aptly described as “an asbestos suit against the bonfire of the vanities.”
The female silhouette most closely associated with the’ 80s, particularly within women’s work wear across Europe and North America, was characterized by overly padded shoulders: Think Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. The “power suit”—an imitation of menswear that leaned on the importance of self-presentation in the decade’s increasingly corporatized workplaces—would become inextricably linked to the rise of the enterprising self and the neoliberal politics of Reagan and Thatcher.
