Tonight is la fête de la musique. All of Paris is out on the streets to celebrate the summer solstice with music, dancing, carousing, and more. En route home from the last show, we passed a classical violinist playing on Pont Neuf, drum ’n’ bass on Rue Saint-Denis, Seine-side tango, and bad Bon Jovi by La Bourse. The city was still sunlit, just about, at 9:30pm.
“I want to hope for some light, even if very small,” Rei Kawakubo said in the customary nugget of communication that accompanied this afternoon’s CDG Homme Plus show. Today’s connection between music and light across Paris also served to transmit the sense of intent that dwelt within this enthralling collection.
To soundtrack its debut down the runway, Kawakubo chose a London Symphony Orchestra performance of Erik Satie’s music for Parade, a ballet first commissioned for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. At the insistence of writer Jean Cocteau, the music included sounds from a typewriter, guns, and sirens (a real siren screamed outside during this show). As well as the set, its costumes were designed by Pablo Picasso in a Cubist style: mind-blowing ‘fits that were ridiculed or dismissed when they dropped.
Which brings us back to Rei Kawakubo’s Parade-soundtracked fashion parade, which was entitled “The Hope of Light.” Her models wore headpieces made of hair clips and ruffled shoes by Kids Love Gaite (plus some pink-pimped Nike Sense 96 SPs). Her costumes might have been not quite as radically silhouetted as Picasso’s (for their purpose and context were different), but they were adjacently transgressive.
The opening cavalry coat featured ruffle-edged extended armholes that looped down to the hip. Later, trouser cavalry stripes were replaced with ruffles beneath jackets whose ruffle lapels, especially when hugging the neck close at the back, resembled clown collars: a carnivalesque and absurdist touch. Pants relaxed into superwide lacy layers. There was a conversation between black and pink in pieces that looked creatively wounded, with folds of satin-ish pink pulled out or half sewn in place by the failed restraining order of black wool. These jackets were worn with pink-ruffled tulle-fronted shorts or pink-zippered black scuba pants.
Look 24’s collarless paisley short suit and epauletted cloak of vertically multicolored striped but horizontally waled corduroy (with hair clip and ruffled shoe) was manifestly a radical look, unfamiliar: The fearlessness it demanded was attractive. We saw a sequel to the black-pink section in soft all-pink not-really suiting that featured knotted sleeves and ties attached like strange webbing to the garments.
At the close, Kawakubo dwelt on outerwear edged in opaque tulle that was either lumpily stuffed with fabric to build silhouette or layered with garments grafted within. The closing look was the opener metamorphosed, mixing sheerness and sections of metallic or color-dotted silk jacquard within the original silhouette—albeit minus the ruffles.
The ballet whose score we had just listened to premiered in 1917, during one of the darkest moments of that century. Its audience was given program notes in which the writer Guillaume Apollinaire was inspired to invent a new term to describe it. Parade, he wrote, represented “a kind of surrealism. In my view, this is just the first of many manifestations of the New Spirit now abroad.” Conservative critics loathed the piece, while those with less to lose saw it as an artistic mechanism of release through which to escape the brutality and bleakness of that moment. Music, movement, light, hope: Today’s collection was poetry in the medium of menswear.
