The first look out at Comme des Garçons SS27 was a pumpkin: raw denim, roughly hewn, worn as a dress, with red fabric swirling behind its jagged teeth and a white padded crown balanced on top. ‘When royal life and everyday life become one,’ said Rei Kawakubo, and that was the entire brief. No further elaboration was offered, nor was any needed.
Denim, bistro tablecloth, striped ticking. These were the fabrics Kawakubo chose to confer royal treatment upon, and the collision of the mundane with the ceremonial was, as ever, the whole argument. A dress with hips wide enough to require their own geometry appeared cut from a check cloth you might expect to find beneath a carafe in a Parisian brasserie. Striped ticking was quilted into rigid ribs, then draped across the body as an asymmetric top with a matching skirt, while beneath it, compacted red tulle spilled out like guts. The image was both regal and visceral, and Kawakubo seemed entirely comfortable with that contradiction.
Comme des Garçons SS27: The Colour of Regicide
Red recurred throughout with the insistence of a symbol. Slashes of it appeared as hair, fringe, and coils of fabric bursting from several outfits, lending the collection what felt like a sense of regicide. A plastic white ribcage encased a dress of balled-up red polka dots. Quilted poplin pieces were jigsawed into abstractions of frock coats. Kingly brocade burst from beneath beige corduroy, an image that read as meditation on the distance between rich and poor, gut and glory, the body beneath the costume.
There is a long tradition in fashion of using clothes to interrogate power, but Kawakubo’s approach is rarely so legible as a political argument. Here, though, the vocabulary was unusually clear: crowns, brocade, architectural skirts, the colour of spilled blood. Whether the intention was satirical or elegiac is, characteristically, left to the viewer.
The finale returned to denim, the fabric of the opening look, but the crowns were gone. Kawakubo replaced them with golden domes atop wide sculptural skirts, while denim trousers spilled into a train behind. If the collection opened with a monarch in the making, it closed on something that felt like aftermath. A regime change conducted in cotton and corduroy.
The Designer Behind the Disruption
To understand why Kawakubo can do this, and why the fashion industry takes the resulting clothes seriously rather than simply bemused, it helps to know where she came from. According to the Comme des Garçons official store, she studied fine arts and aesthetics at Keio University, then worked in advertising at a textile company and as a freelance stylist before she ever cut a pattern. There was no formal training in garment construction, no apprenticeship under a couturier. The clothes came later, and came from somewhere else entirely: from an eye trained on aesthetics, and a mind that had spent years thinking about how image and material communicate meaning.
She began designing under the name Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969, formally incorporated the company in 1973, and opened her first boutique two years after that. That is more than fifty years of refusing to resolve the tension between beauty and difficulty, between the wearable and the confrontational. SS27 sits comfortably within that lineage: it is not a departure, it is another proof of method.
The collection was photographed by Christina Fragkou, whose images capture the structural ambition of each look without softening the edges. A pumpkin made of denim deserves a straight-faced portrait, and that is what it receives. The crowns may have gone by the finale, but the grand designs, as the show notes put it, remained entirely intact.
