Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, has not left Japan since the outbreak of Covid. Known as a designer who controls each and every detail of her kingdom, the last two years have forced her to live in A confined reality, limited to the boundaries of her home and office located in central Tokyo. The shows she used to present in Paris since the early 1980s have been moved to a modest space located on the top floor of the company’s office building. Kawakubo’s extraordinary designs express how she perceives the world, at times responsive to current affairs and at others appearing as a prophet, and occasionally completely disconnected in a world of her own. Kawakubo started out by studying philosophy rather than fashion, which seems to have become the basis of what she presents under the spotlight of the runway; a Japanese philosopher whose main language is the visual one.
BLACK ROSE is the name of the collection Kawakubo presents for Autumn Winter 2022. Unsurprisingly, an unequivocal reference is difficult to infer given the delicate state of the world today, while at the same time, reality is present in each and every element of the show. One may wonder whether we as viewers suffer from the inability to disconnect from a powerful reality, even at the entrance of the isolated space where the show takes place? Or maybe it is Kawakubo, who must have started working on the collection long before the Russian invasion, managing to once again produce fashion so independent from the rest of the industry, alienated from mainstream conceptions of clothing yet able to magically predict and touch reality in a profound, focused and painful way.
In previous interviews, Kawakubo notes that her creative process of a collection often begins with one word, from which she embarks on a journey, sometimes lacking clear direction or logic. There is no black rose in nature, only dark shades of other colours. The rose can symbolise revolution, and the black rose in particular can symbolise anarchist movements. The black that unfolds and disintegrates in the collection evokes these references and other emotions, which is amplified by the spectacle itself commencing in darkness. The space is suddenly flooded with light, concentrated between two beams facing each other on either ends of the space, dazzling the models walking below. Contrary to the sterile, pristine notion of the runway, the clothing and shoes leave dust marks and dirt tracks, transforming Kawakubo’s floor into an image of land that has seen vast amounts of human movement.