We always underlined the Junya Watanabe’s peculiar interpretative ability in establishing, in the form of dress, the predominant stresses of our time. Post-modern, cyber-punk, tailor-philosopher of an age crossed by very fast transformations, where, from collection to collection, plastics and brand new materials, parts of abandoned industrial landscapes, occurred, to give shape to his personal metabolization and to his interpretation of the contemporaneity.

With the Spring / Summer 2017 is the fierce spirit of the Japanese designer, produced by Comme des Garçons Maison, to manifest itself in the sunny morning walkway of Palais du Tokyo. Deafening hard-rock music accompanies the proud and hurried pace of bewildering metropolitan warriors, evidently intolerant towards an increasingly thorny and demanding present, exceedingly conformist.

To reinforce the rhythm are the classical decorative elements of the punk movement: crests and other disheveled and colorful hairstyles, tattered leggings and hyper-skimpy mini-skirts.

Photo by Vogue

Photo by Vogue

Photo by Vogue

But the Watanabe quat is not slavish and nostalgic, but provocative and pungent. The cue becomes an opportunity to continue with origami exercises, the textiles module is pyramidal, the threatening metal edges of studs and piercings gain lightness and grace in organza processing, up to the extremes such as a stellar westcoat, not by chance pale pink , returning in serious synthetic leather bags and accessories.

The oscillation between the opposite poles: serious and mild, warlike and docile, composes and articulates the collection. On one side the impetus and vigor of oversize volumes, such as sweatshirts, parca and t-shirt and on the other side the feminine silhouette clearly defined by unexpected draperies, generated by semi-invisible seams, floral bouquet and more accommodating fabrics, like organza and georgette.

Against all odds and reference, the two extremes coexist in a new aesthetic balance, where the mutual control and enhancement generates the most unexpected and unlikely punk expression, poetry!

Find more regarding IVO MILAN Radical Fashion‘s choice directly from Place Vendôme – Paris show-room:

While it is now imminent the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in New York, dedicated to the work of  Rei Kawakubo’s – Comme des Garçons and curated by Andrew Bolton (it will be inaugurate on 4^th of May), the famous online magazine, AnOther, reveals in a long article the showroom of the well know Japanese Maison, the anti-fashion temple par excellence.

Photo by AnOtherMag

A good cue for leading you inside with our video shooting of the Spring/Summer of 2017. Rare outstanding material, a concession obtained with a long collaboration and with a peculiar organization of the store activity, with preparation, archival and historical memory and, above all, with an approach to new proposals of recipients otherwise poorly assisted by scarce communication on this kind of clothing.

For some years now Rei Kawakubo uses the catwalk as the sheet music upon which composes the ceremony of her collections. No more suggestions on what to wear during the season, but philosophical insights translated into highly complex textile forms, from which to draw clues on fabrics and weights that will make up the seasonal assortment. The designer explores and then wraps the spirit of time presenting it to a tense audience with the sacrifice of an increasingly less accessible and intelligible comprehension but, in its abstract distance, more and more poetic and theatrical.

Photo by Crash

In the Place Vendôme space, the bulky shapes resize, becoming viable clothing, which does not deny the feminine silhouette with the excesses promised in the fashion show. The camouflage is wearable in the asymmetries of jackets and t-shirts. The disturbing paddings for the summer translate into irregular folds, stylistic solutions that enhance the movement of the garments or decorative elements for an easier use and composition.

The selection takes place in a space stolen to huge sequenced installations, works first withheld from scene, then immersed in the soundtrack which, looped for days, it evokes and reinforces the suggestions of the recent stage show.

In the middle of the Paris Fashion Week for the next Autumn/Winter, it should be reported an other very important acknowledgement to the designer who most was able to connect clothing to concepts as innovation, experimentation and research. On Saturday 5^th March, at Issey Miyake boutique of Rue Royale in Paris, it will be launched an unpublished monograph dedicated by the Taschen publishing house to the Japanese master and to his prolific and hyper-technologic  Design Miyake Studio, established in the 1970.

A book that, not by chance, is launched almost simultaneously with the exhibition that will be opened on the 16^th of March at the National Art Center of Tokyo, completely installed to celebrate the professional history and the cultural contributions introduced by the researches carried out during these years by the researchers team involved in Issey Miyake’s ambitious creative project.

A long, extensive tale of the different steps that have characterised of the well-known polyester pleating, today present in the most prestigious shops in the world with the bran new version called “Baked Stretch”.

The chromatic and formal possibilities opened by this innovative material manufacturing, so called ‘baked’ as the pleats take their aspects after a heath exposition process very similar to the one of the bread rising, reveal the maturity and the extreme autonomy gained by the excellent collaborators chosen by Issey Miyake, among them it’s not possible to not mention the Maison creative director, the young Yoshiyuki Miyamae.

Click here to watch the video.

For those who would not have the chance to participate to the Paris event, nor to go directly to Tokyo, they can anyway lost themselves in the different pages describing the vast and futuristic repertoire of the Japanese designer. In fact the book is already available on the Taschen website and in the next months it would be distributed by the libraries and by the authorized boutiques.

Reversible top and skirt .

Reversible dress.

The Comme des Garcons spring/summer 2012 collection, baptized White Drama by Rei Kawakubo, is steeped in symbolic meaning. The title introduces the major role played by the leading color of the parade – white - very unusual in the world of the Japanese school, which has always focused on the possibilities and conceptual properties of black.

The extremely scenic impact of the light and structure of the clothes intersect, helping to shape a considerable body of thoughts on the status of women, inside the potent setting of religious ceremonial wear. Floral patterns that grace tulle impalpably or more exuberantly in sewn lace, decorate, wrap and contain; volumes exaggerated with crinolines and insistent three-dimensional stratification cannot help but evoke the wedding dress. Just as the hats, headdresses, veils covering their faces, the atmosphere is one that leads to the altar.

But the genius of Rei Kawakubo is not content merely to stage the ceremony; she constructs its probable developments and reveals its dark implications.

The pace of the ritual is trapped by huge and long sleeves, restrained by festive ribbons. The most magnificent architecture of dresses and skirts reveal their double nature as cages, prisons of the spirit. In this perspective, the improbable and artistic polystyrene hairstyles seem more like complex, deformed brains searching for a way to escape.

A mocking, controversial, even melancholic analysis of a world of women barely emancipated, still poorly understood, and sometimes victims of their own illusions is presented on the catwalk, and is then reshaped in pieces of a collection of sensational beauty, sensitive to details of rare poetry. An aesthetic legacy of the undisputable and essential right of every woman to like herself as much as possible!

Watch Comme des Garçons spring-summer 2012 collection, from Palais de la Femme, Paris