Fashion Up There Where the Air Is Thin
By CINTRA WILSON
Published: September 9, 2009
WHILE performing at Madison Square Garden in 2006, Barbra Streisand dressed down a heckler in fragrant language. “The artist’s role is to disturb,” she said, after apologizing.
The designer Rei Kawakubo has successfully kept Comme des Garçons just as provocative and defiantly crazy-looking as it was when it first prosecuted shock and awe on the runway in the early 1980s.
For the 2009 spring collection, the runway models had Marie Antoinette-style wigs made of gauze bandages. The black vinyl garments looked like something a naked fugitive would assemble if he were trapped in a garage full of covered cars with nothing but an X-Acto knife. Hats were made of what looked like mangled black tetherballs.
For the fall collection, the models’ hair resembled dislodged brains; their faces were wrapped in filmy nylon printed with a smudgy pair of blood-red lips. Depending on how the lips were tied to the model’s face (never on the mouth), they alternately resembled a war wound, a fresh nose job or a massive cold sore.
If Marni is postsex, Comme des Garçons might be described as post-reason. It accepts no visual limits, and forces fashion considerably beyond its comfort zone with enormous style and black humor. Take, for example, Comme des Garçons’s first “anti-perfume”: Odeur 53, a blend of bizarre notes including oxygen, “flash of metal,” mineral carbon, nail polish, cellulose, burnt rubber and “flaming rock.”
I guarantee you that no fragrance designers at Coty are sitting around, dreamily licking D cell batteries and saying: “Hey! Let’s make a perfume that smells like an asteroid hitting a manicure parlor.” You want white lace and peach blossoms, indulge in a bottle of Jessica Simpson’s Fancy Love. Odeur 53 is not for those who need to be universally liked.
The boutique is virtually hidden in Chelsea’s art-gallery zone. From the outside, it appears to be an old brick garage called Heavenly Body Works, plastered in layers of peeling art posters. But within the bricks is a wormhole to another dimension: a stainless steel esophagus leading to a haystack-shape glass doorway ... and that’s where all visual logic pretty much stops.
A saleswoman was wearing a dress from the line I have called “the condom collection”: a rumpled secretary cardigan and leggings, under an exterior tube dress of clingy nude nylon ($1,730). I thought she looked as if she were wearing a curious inside-out temple garment, apart from her bright red moccasins with black toes painted on them.
A few of the men’s shoes could be worn south of the Mason-Dixon Line only if a guy was determined to get the pie beaten out of him. Dig it: men’s patent leather Mary Janes. Two girly buckles across the arch, and big shiny bows on the toes. To all tough guys who feel the need to carry assault rifles into national parks: I triple-dog dare you. You’re not man enough to wear these shoes. Only a man who fears absolutely nothing could wear them. Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he actually were the Terminator and saving California from aliens, would wear these shoes. These shoes tell you exactly what a moral coward you are for not being queer-positive enough to wear them. They are dainty like a chain saw.
All kidding aside, there was a men’s wear item that I strongly hope will enter the mainstream: business kilts, in gray flannel and pinstripes, with big black buckles ($865). These are gorgeous, sexy, elegant and goose-bumpingly cool. I believe it is the moral and civic duty of senior Goldman Sachs executives to legitimize this look for Wall Street. Throw us a bone, boys ... you owe us.
My new style hero Johanna (who always seems to pull off remarkable Alexander Wang-cum-“Star Trek” silhouettes) managed to slip away from her job at Elle to join me; she was particularly taken by a pair of army green, unisex adult footie pajamas ($250).
We admired a skirt made of cotton tablecloth gingham, bound in black nylon straps at the top, and bunched at the back. It’s the Japanese bondage-bustle that Shirley Jones would wear for the surrealistic square-dancing scene in the new musical, “Yokohama!”
“I want to try that!” I shrieked, pointing at one of the employees, who wore a large black quilted pyramid hanging on gold chains from her shoulders ($2,200).
The staff got nervous eyebrows.
“Michiko will help you,” the keeper of the pyramid said with detectable reluctance.
Michiko Higuchi retrieved the heavy garment from the back and escorted me behind an enormous curved wall to a black slab bench that looked like a miniature Vietnam Memorial.
Putting this dress on was like trying to put snow tires on a sleeping bag, from the inside.
“You have to go in there,” Ms. Higuchi said, bravely trying to guide me through a seemingly endless darkness to the elusive exit points. We went through four or five fully assisted, failed attempts to put the dress on the right way.
“You don’t have it,” she kept saying, with increasing despair. I finally burst into uncontrollable giggling and quit when I got my head and both arms successfully out and through.
It still wasn’t on right, but nobody climbs K2 without training, either.
Do the ends justify the means? Are Comme des Garçons creations wearable? Are they realistic? Are they cute? Comme des Garçons does not answer these questions. Your approval is not its raison d’être — and this is what makes Comme des Garçons so incredibly great.
America hasn’t quite grocked the idea that civilization is desirable; that culture is the cornerstone of civilization, and that a thriving culture supports unfettered — read: occasionally offensive — art.
Art can’t just press your pleasure buttons and sell itself to you. It can’t need to care whether you like it — that’s the space where new ideas are born. It can’t just “think outside the box.” For art to do its job, it has to fill the box with yak dung and get as far away from it as humanly possible.
Michelle Obama seems, at least theoretically, to support such free expression: Earlier this year she wore an asymmetrical turquoise cardigan by Ms. Kawakubo’s protégé Junya Watanabe to the Royal Opera House in London.
God bless you, Mrs. President.
COMMES DES GARCONS
520 West 22nd Street (near 10th Avenue); (212) 604-9200.
COMME DES DIEUX One of Japan’s great design gods continues to work in mysterious ways, pushing the envelope of style until it bursts inside-out into an origami blowfish. It is not for philistines, and sometimes, it isn’t even for people who really appreciate it. (Nude manty hose — my phrase, not theirs — $130.)
COMME DES MONSTRES A prebloodstained button-down shirt for your favorite American Psycho ($505). Black down coats in oversize shapes evoking manta rays and gravestones, for your Uncle Fester ($1,320). If you demand that your clothing break free of stupid laws laid down for ordinary mortals, this is your wardrobe.
[FONT="]JE NE COMME PREND PAS Blazers sewn onto overcoats, and overcoats sewn onto horse blankets. Men’s leopard-print ballerina pumps, like the ubiquitous Tory Burch flat, only for Tarzan. We may not wear it all, but we must be grateful it exists.[/FONT]
