Comme des Garçons

“In the chiffon trenches, Ms. Kawakubo is the only designer who thinks like an artist, in that she creates fashion that modifies your view of something, be it women or an aspect of culture. … Her latest collection seemed to turn couture, and the fashion world’s obsession with iconic shapes and structure, on its ear. Her opening coats, nipped-waist jackets and dresses were rendered as flat two-dimensional shapes in a polyester felt. Their size reinforced the point; they looked stamped out, like so many handbags, by those mercurial giants of fashion.” —Cathy Horyn, The New York Times

“The emotional reaction to taking all this in went somewhere deeper than the intellectual. It called up a sense of childlike freedom and enjoyment—memories, maybe, of spontaneous preschool play with fuzzy felt shapes, paper cutouts, and the paintbox.” —Sarah Mower, Vogue.com

Buzz Words:
oversized, extra-long, vivid, stretched and distorted, cartoonish, rigorous challenges, glorious, extraordinarily simple, extraordinary, breathtaking in its boldness and vivacity, played to the max, absolutely new, oversize, pure, lovely color and pattern, delight, abstract, curviform, graphic jigsaws, squiggly cloudlike forms, collaged cutouts, cartoon hues, prodigious prints, appeared super-voluminous when seen head-on, actually steamroller-flat, breathtaking, surreal, and definitely a bit strange, intellectually playful, fashion at its most lovingly distilled, beautifully naive, hyper wide, spiritual air, ingenuity, glorified the flat, cutout paper-dolliness, cari-couture, angular planes, minimalist yet equally flamboyant, big and bold, explosion of outsized graphic precision and vibrant color, big and flat, beguiling, clownish paper dolls, as unfettered as preschool cutouts, megapatterns, fabulous, wow, indeed