Skip to content
SIMULACRA

SOURCE vogue.comReferenced from its source. Rights not established by SIMULACRA.

PLATES 9

Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body

Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons · Spring/Summer 1997

OVERVIEW

Rei Kawakubo's spring/summer 1997 collection for Comme des Garçons, immediately nicknamed Lumps and Bumps. Stretch gingham and nylon dresses carried down-filled pads inserted at the shoulder, the spine, the hip and the stomach, displacing the body into shapes that belong to no anatomy.

The press read it as deformity. Kawakubo's position was simpler and stranger: the dress and the body are two things that meet, and there is no reason the body should win.

WHY IT MATTERS

The collection that treated the human silhouette as a variable rather than a given, and made every later discussion of altered anatomy possible.

CONTEXT

Kawakubo showed in Paris from 1981 alongside Yohji Yamamoto, to the same hostile reception. Comme des Garçons has since run as a group of lines under her direction, with Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya trained inside it.

Merce Cunningham used the garments in Scenario the same year, which is the clearest evidence that they were never about fashion silhouette alone: they change how a body can move.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01The padding is not symmetricalPads sit at different places on different looks. There is no repeated ideal figure being proposed, only displacement.
  2. 02Cheerful cloth, difficult shapeGingham and pastel stretch against a form the press called grotesque. The friction between the two is the collection.
  3. 03It changes the walkWatch the runway footage rather than stills. Weight at the spine or hip alters gait, which is why Cunningham could choreograph with it.
  4. 04No tailoringNothing here is cut to a body. The garment is a volume the body is placed inside, which is the opposite of the tradition it was shown against.

CONNECTIONS

EXPLORE FURTHER

RELATED SIGNALS

RELATED ENTRIES