Comme des Garçons Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection

“What I create is nothing but an expression of my own issues, of what’s inside my head. It’s all about my own values. Of course, I understand those who don’t agree. I accept them. That is freedom.” So says Rei Kawakubo in an interview that’s part of next month’s Vogue Japan cover story. That article also features an excellent editorial shoot dedicated to last season’s collection, which Kawakubo said was motivated by anger. Today’s, as paraphrased by her husband, Adrian Joffe, in the backstage receiving line, was more redemptive: “With the state of the world as it is, the future as uncertain as it is, if you put air and transparency into the mix of things, there could be the possibility of hope.”

The show opened with a triptych of looks that were all white and all rigid. They looked to be in a resin-coated fabric or even something akin to fiberglass. Along with that rigidity, the almost Doric ridges of these structures’ surfaces, plus the deliberate slowness with which their valiant models were obliged to walk, lent them a monumental gravitas. They turned out also to be sculptural toiles of looks to come. These later equivalents were clad in fabrics, silk jacquards to the eye, whose patterning could have stemmed from multiple transnational traditions across Asia and Africa. The stiff ridges of before had transformed into strongly upholstered quilting, soft this time. These supersize structures featured oversized sleeves or sometimes unused armholes.

Around them were shown looks that swaddled the models with metal mesh structures filled with material that sometimes resembled insulation down, or were other times encased in a further layer of photo-print fabric. Just glimpse-able as one dress passed was a collage of what looked like protest placards: “Protect our…” I read, before the model moved the message out of sight.

Further looks swathed the models in a supersize cone of white filament clad in gold-flecked gauze and garlanded with scarlet tulle. There was a white bow-shaped structure shrouded in white fishnet that was waisted by another scarlet bow. There were more package dresses, composed of multiple conjoined sections of bagged material, sometimes patterned in an abstracted scarlet on white relief. At the end came a final triptych of wearable architecture: three mega-dresses fashioned from what resembled rolled cylinders or scrunched lumps of wrapping plastic. In that Vogue Japan interview, Kawakubo said, “I only create things that I think are new and that I myself am stimulated by.” Today she delivered another dose of powerful unfamiliarity for us to interrogate and savor.