After the recent volume by Taschen on the Pleats Please by Issey Miyake, the most important European publishing house specialised in art, architecture and design is about to publish two monographs on the work of another two excellent names of the so-called Japanese school: Rei Kawakubo-Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. In December, publication is planned of:

-The art of anti-fashion. Yohji Yamamoto: The fashion designer who redesigned fashion

and

-Conceptual clothing. The history and the art of Kawakubo’s brand

Two different surveys, including images and interviews with photographers, artists, intellectuals and experts, on the professional and artistic philosophy of the two designers who, in different ways, have destabilised traditional western fashion codes. Rei Kawakubo, more conceptual than subversive,

Yohji Yamamoto, more abstract and rigorous,

both supporting clothing with a high artistic value, cultured and complex, often difficult to assimilate and understand.

While awaiting these precious pieces to be added to our fashion and design library, we would like to share with you a wonderful documentary on the last exhibition at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris, dedicated to the White Drama collection (spring/summer 2012) of Comme des Garçons…

Perhaps it is these more far reaching experiences and the need to intercept prepared, independent interlocutors, as well as measuring oneself on more talented ground, that explain the recent accusation made by Rei Kawakubo against the media…

I think the media has some responsibility to bear for people becoming more conservative. Many parts of the media have created the situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive… (Rei Kawakubo, 19/11/2012, Women’s Wear Daily)

Thanks for the images to: Taschen and Grandma Stole My Closet

If you have not already planned one, here’s an excellent reason to arrange a trip to the Ville Lumiére in the next six months. Today they are inaugurating the reopening of the Musée Galliera inside Les Docks, on the Quai d’Austerlitz, the new warehouses along the Seine used as Cité de La Mode et du Design.

For the occasion, the Museum’s artistic director, Olivier Baillard, fascinated by the show “White Drama” by Rei Kawakubo – Comme des Garçons, presented during the Paris spring-summer 2012 collection fashion week last October, has decided to host the great Japanese designer’s entire collection.

From today, 13 April, till 7 October 2012, visitors can admire the structure, designed by Kawakubo himself, containing all this season’s items. We must add that the choice to exhibit such recent material is an absolute world first, as they have only ever held retrospective exhibitions.

As Baillard himself says, about his choice and Kawakubo’s work:

“This fashion show is a tour de force as an immaterial dimension exudes from these fashion architectures and hits the spiritual transporting you into the unclassifiable universe of Rei Kawakubo [...]

This collection is a poetical manifesto going beyond fashion. It is the museum’s role to offer a freeze-frame, slow down time and the tyranny of immediacy. While giving everyone the chance to discover the entire show, it allows us to show people that fashion demands a lot of work, method and requirements, not just time”.

A must opportunity to discover the artistic validity of Rei Kawakubo, recognised as one of the most important, radical creators of modern fashion.

For more about the White Drama collection, please go to the following link

http://radicalfashion.ivomilan.it/it/various/comme-des-garcons-spring-summer-2012/

Practical information

Les Dock – Cité de la Mode et du Design:

34 qui d’Austerlitz

75013 Paris

Tel.: 01 76 77 25 30

Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm except public holidays

Entrance ticket:

Full price: € 6

Reduced price: € 4,5

Youth price (14-26): € 3

Free for under 14s

Access:

Metro: Gare d’Austerlitz, Quai de la Gare, Gare de Lyon

Bus: 24, 57, 61, 63, 89, 91

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