Comme des Garçons AW25 Rejects Corporate Convention and Embraces Acid Chaos
Paris Fashion Week AW25
Written by Jude Jones
For a little while, the call has been coming from inside the house. Since Parasite’s outsider success on screens in 2019, Hollywood has been making millions on the banal message that rich people suck, rich people are the problem via hits like Knives Out and The White Lotus (this trope of course isn’t new, but Parasiteseemed to signal to pelican-mouthed executives that a critique, however surface level, of wealth – and, mind, just of wealthy individuals, not of the extractive methods by which wealth is created – was the ready-made recipe for another box-office smash).
Within this cultural mode of capitalist bigwigs profiting off of humdrum capitalist critique (what Marxist theorist Mark Fisher has called a “capitalist realism”), the luxury fashion complex hasn’t long lagged behind. Protected by their nominal statuses as creative machines – which carries with it a whispered suggestion of leftist mores – fashion giants like French-owned LVMH, the corporate conglomerate that owns, among others, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Givenchy, and Celine, have cosied all smiles to the likes of Donald Trump and the new American Right. Meanwhile, smaller cult brands like Praying have financially and virally profited from an irony-fuelled, anti-woke self-posturing while bigger names like Miu Miu have popularised a streamlined, office-ready, “clean girl” look, an aesthetic characterised in certain privy circles as a “fascist indicator.” The fashion industry has at this terminal point well metabolised capitalist realism’s scraps.
Well – that is – the fashion industry with notable exceptions. Although I’m sure Alexander McQueen would be well rolling in his grave at the direction that his former house Givenchy has since taken, there are still figures of an older vanguard resisting the bind of smaller silhouettes, bigger profits. “Recently,” wrote Rei Kawabuko of her AW25 showing for Comme des Garçons (CDG), a brand she founded way back in the ‘60s, “we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all. There is also a strong value in small. Small can be mighty.”
Thus distilling her collection to just 20 looks – versus the 50, 60, 70 plus her fellow fashion titans have become accustomed to churning each season – this was the outer limit of how CDG’s smallness was imagined and defined. Designs this season were monumental, on the verge of pure architecture, subsuming models beneath impossible folds and throes of fabric, hiding faces behind undulating hats and abstract headpieces.
And in juxtaposition to the supernova colour palettes that Kawabuko has historically curated – conjoining a romantic Japanese yesteryear to a blistering, Harajuku-streets future – her chromatic language this season, as if not to drown out her sculptural maximalism, was minimal: navy blue or black pinstripe, dogtooth tweed in pied black-and-white.
In this tendency to textures often overrepresented in office-wear and menswear, now taking on in her hands Dali-esque or biblically-accurate-angel shapes, as if frozen suddenly in the process of annihilatory explosion, CDG seems to be telling a joke, one at the expense of everybody else and their “clean girl”, corporatised doggerel. A joke about what it truly means to challenge the status quo and what it truly means to be small.
Mark Fisher, in his more mature works, post-Capitalist Realism, posited that the only way to escape capitalism’s grinding feedback loop might be “acid communism”, consummated by a sacred diet of hallucinogenics and ecstatic daydreaming. Kawabuko, with her fluctuating forms and metaphoric explosion of sartorial codes, seems to this season be taking a concentrated, tiny-but-mighty hit. This collection may never end up being a smash hit on the marketplace, but that’s far from the point; CDG “Smaller is Stronger” was a win for creativity, and there is a power transcendent of quantities, statistics, and figures to that.
