“I have anger against everything in the world, especially against myself.”
Such was the explanation by Rei Kawakubo for a Comme des Garçons collection that was an explosion of chaotic femininity — bows and bustles and puffs and flounces — all in black, scarified by prints of barbed wire and chains, legs bound by ribbons. Like the emotion, however, the clothes were (in the spectrum of Comme des Garçons) strikingly recognizable: a pair of pants here, a dress there. It was impossible not to look at them and think: Yeah, I see you.
The models stamped their feet at the photographers and clenched their fists; occasionally body-checked one another, or paused to turn and face down the front row, looming over the seated guests like a dare. They might have been trapped in the flirty, fussy tropes of girlhood, but in Ms. Kawakubo’s hands, such clichés become blunt-force weapons. Sometimes, you just have to dress your inner child like she wants to get out and rampage. Against injustice, war, all the -isms, attempts to keep anyone in their box. Whatever makes your blood boil.
It’s no longer an apolitical season — and not just because, Anna Wintour of Vogue was due to co-host a fund-raiser in Paris for President Biden.
There’s been a lot of moaning over a spate of appointments of male designers at major houses, but by the penultimate day of fashion month, a powerful chorus of female voices was taking shape. Talking about “being a woman designer making clothes for women,” as both Marine Serre and Stella McCartney said. Making points, and scoring them, in all sorts of ways. That France just became the first country in the world to enshrine a right to abortion in its Constitution was a coincidence, but a fitting one.
At Hermès, Nadège Vanhee poured rain down onto the middle of her runway as an army of sharp-edged luxury biker chicks, leather babes from the tips of their (st)riding boots to their leather jeans, pencil skirts and bomber jackets marched by. It might be grim out there, but not a drop did touch them.
Ms. Serre, back on the schedule after a few seasons away, focused almost entirely on jersey — in her signature moon bodysuits and dresses, now sparkling with starlight; in draped fishtail cocktail frocks and easy daywear — plus some upcycled silk scarves smocked to give them elasticity and patchworked together into gorgeous little dresses.
Because that expansiveness and stretch means you can breathe, she said before a show that offered a wardrobe for a life well lived, featuring characters of all ages and shapes on a stroll through a weekend market, toting groceries and newspaper and flowers and, in one case, a baby. If you can’t fill your lungs in what you wear, she added, “it makes it very hard to be alive.”
Or to grow, part of Stella McCartney’s agenda in a show dedicated to Mother Earth, complete with a prose poem as a mission statement. One that started gently, but rose to a mantra of impatience, as a voice-over demanded it’s about time that humanity mend its ways — with an extra expletive in there for good measure. A lot of extra expletives.
Ninety percent of the collection was made up of “responsible fibers,” her press notes read, including the silver sequins that decorated a pair of jeans like chaps and the croc-effect trench coats that were actually made from Uppeal, an apple-based leather alternative. That those fibers were being used in the service of producing new clothes was a problem Ms. McCartney didn’t really acknowledge (no one in fashion wants to deal with that), but the fact remains that after seasons of various industry players giving lip service to sustainability, she and Ms. Serre were practically the only designers in this city to place it front and center. Ms. McCartney pretty much whacked everyone over the head with it.
“It’s about scale,” Ms. McCartney said after the show. “And power.” The power to create change, and to demand it. The power that can be conveyed to individuals through their clothes.
So she built David Byrne-size mega shoulders into jackets and trench coats, the better to ram her point home (along with a tank top with the show’s mission statement as a slogan). Threw in some easy T-shirt silk dresses trailing parachute trains, and giant, loopy knits — not quite as big as some of Ms. Kawakubo’s ginormous dresses, but still demanding that attention be paid.
Just as the big bristly knits did at Sacai, where Chitose Abe performed her signature alchemy with the building blocks of wardrobes (military ribbed knits, tuxedos, explorer raincoats) to create 47 dresses in a celebration of the most quintessentially feminine garment. They were all worn over hybrid pant-boots: over-the-knee boots encased in a pant leg lopped off at the thigh that were, perhaps, the slyest and most pointed comment on old gender roles this season.
Who wears the pants? No one. The pants have left the building. They’re something else now. And they are ready to start kicking.
Vanessa Friedman
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