Royal treatment: Comme des Garçons examines modern grandeur
For Spring-Summer 2027, Comme des Garçons spliced court dress and workwear, triggering a reflection on status, self-coronation and contemporary behaviour. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
“Must be the reason why I’m king of my castle. Must be a reason why I’m making examples of you.” The Wamdue Project’s eternal words echoed into the night as Comme des Garçons released Rei Kawakubo’s season statement post-show: “When royal life and everyday life become one,” it read, with typical loaded brevity. With her giant creations, Kawakubo has a way of making examples of us: putting a mastodon mirror up to her audience. Thinking about it as you do after a Comme des Garçons experience, the juxtaposition she staged between her crowned, regal silhouettes and the workingman’s denim from which they were largely constructed felt like a kind of blurring of hierarchy.
Crowns, inflated skirts and regal volumes suggested court dress, but Kawakubo built much of that grandeur from denim, canvas and other fabrics associated with work and utility. The result was less about dressing like royalty than collapsing the distance between the throne and the street. Nowadays, ordinary life is increasingly behaving like royal life, what with everyone curating, broadcasting and mythologising themselves. In politics, on social media and all the corners of daily life, status, ceremony and self-coronation have migrated into everyday behaviour.
Through that lens, the point on the narrow Comme des Garçons runway when Kawakubo’s models had to pass each other in their sizeable looks became all the more loaded. The territorial, self-entitled manners generated by the self-coronation of popular culture, where everyone is king of their castle, havecreated a climate that lacks the courtesy and cordiality of the old world. We’re literally not getting out of the way for one another. Kawakubo’s ability to trigger so much reflection from shape, fabric and proportion is the enduring brilliance of Comme des Garçons. She impacts your way of seeing.
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