The Most Hype-Worthy Show From Paris Fashion Week Fall 2018 definitely goes to Comme des Garçons Homme Plus!
There’s always the possibility—or danger—that Rei Kawakubo’s work is a spectator’s Rorschach test; i.e., you see in it what’s going on inside your own head. But here’s something to throw out there about her last two menswear shows: first a glitter fest in which she let young models rave around like the bunch of youths they actually were, now a procession that began with boys wearing dinosaur masks and Superman cartoon prints. Two and two together—isn’t she somehow examining the social pressures on boys to become men? If so, it feels like she’s siding with the kids, cheering on the pan-cultural boy obsession with collecting dinosaurs (these ones were almost sweetly nonthreatening, made by the fabric artist Shimoda Masakatsu). Stay harmless! Keep playing with toys! Wear your Superman pajamas outdoors! Don’t grow up into nasty power-crazed men!
Perhaps this is getting carried away. Kawakubo said, inasmuch as she ever does, that the collection was about “White Shock, the punk inside.” With her Homme Plus collection, we are never as much in the realms of abstract concept as we are with her women’s shows. It was possible to look at some of her prints and plasticized textures and think about cracked pavements, gravel, urban architecture, and perhaps go one step further down that path and think about special threats that apply to boys growing up in the concrete jungle.
Were these clothes—mostly white—a shining, synthetic armor sent to encourage and protect a sensitive, still malleable mind from the pressure to become dark and aggressive on the way to manhood? View The Collection below and decide!
