New York Fashion Week has become such a dispiriting spectacle of banality and celebrity entertainment that I did not go a single show. So, on to Paris, the home of real design, or, more accurately, a place where real design is shown.
I first met the photographer Deborah Turbeville in 2011 when I profiled her for our second print volume. It turned out that Deborah was an avid Russophile, and our conversation ranged from her work to her love of Russian literature, cinema, music, and ballet. After Deborah passed away, it was the first article from our print editions that we shared online.
I kept in touch with people who managed Deborah’s estate, and early this year I finally went to see her archive, housed in an Upper East Side townhouse and to meet its co-director, Paul Sinclaire, who also was one of Deborah’s closest friends. While I was browsing the photos, like some kid in gothic Disneyland, I spotted a box titled “Comme des Garçons.” I went through it, and the ethereal, otherworldly photos in it were marked “1981.” Could it be that Deborah had shot the first collection Kawakubo presented in Paris? It very well could, though we did not know for sure. But what I did know was that given the May exhibition of Comme des Garçons at the Met these photos should be made into a book. I asked Paul what he thought about making a book, and he loved the idea.
If you go to the Met Museum’s Comme des Garçons show, do not leave without buying the accompanying catalog. If you don’t go to the show, buy the catalog. This is as simple of advice as I can give you about this stunning publication by the Met (distributed by Yale University Press). The white, oversized…
One of the several questions that came to me as I was leaving the press preview of the “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was, “Who is this exhibit for?” Or, to reframe it in broader context, what is the role of museums today?
This May, Comme des Garçons is launching the Olfactory Library which will bring back 10 iconic scents.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has announced that its spring exhibition will be the overview of the work of none other than Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons.
This week the new fashion exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It aims to challenge the notion, usually found in the popular imagination, that handwork and machine work somehow exist in the state of opposition.
Following its European launch, Comme des Garcons is releasing a new scent, DOT, at Dover Street Market in New York today. Though the company has authored seventy-five scents, DOT is its fifth scent created in-house, and the first since 2011. The scent riffs on the polka dot, which could serve as an unofficial CDG emblem. The prime note in the scent is that of the Osmanthus flower, which grows in the parks all over Japan in the fall.
This past men’s fashion week was marked by a sense of schizophrenia more than anything else. Half of the shows in Paris were held in opulent palatial spaces and the other half in basements stripped of everything but their concrete foundations. The reactions of critics and buyers were similarly split. The editors I spoke with mostly shrugged shoulders and talked of consistently lowering expectations, while buyers thought the season more than solid.
We would like to present to you Comme des Garçons Homme Plus’ Fall/Winter 2016 collection.