You ever like, “Frick this” when you’re at your antisocial best, opting out of whatever party your friends are attending and choosing instead the safety of the couch? Yeah, there’s an outfit for that. At CDG in Paris this weekend, designer Rei Kawakubo designed the ultimate hibernation fashion.
Dress up like a pile of granite, I say. Wrap yourself in the de facto fabric that forms when you haven’t cleaned out the lint filter in your clothes dryer and sculpt it so that you’re both comfortable and bulbous. Remind yourself that all curves are sensual and being enveloped by really comfortable fabric is essentially the ideal state of being.
Kawakubo titled this show “The Future of Silhouette” and its flues and folds recall the architectural way Frank Gehry purports to design buildings (by crumpling up a sheet of paper and sketching what comes out) but with far more forethought, nothing left to chance. She is a true artist, and whatever she was referencing—puppies, tomatoes, your couch—invited further introspection but also seemed simply to elevate the everyday.
As Vogue’s Sarah Mower, a bit flabbergasted in her review, reminds us, Kawakubo is the focus of this year’s Met Gala, and the prospect is both mundane and beyond thrilling; the former because the prospect of an endless stream of celebrities attempting to pay homage via stylists is certain to disappoint, and the latter because given this much leeway, maybe for once it won’t! The way that Kawakubo casts away with formalism and threads the art object into fashion culture in a way that is truly wearable (if you fuckin’ dare) seems a smidge too daring for the celeb set beyond all but a few—and because so many of these Fall 2017 looks are like being eaten alive by an incredibly comfortable beanbag, they seem geared toward the opposite of the glitz, anyway. This shit is for the couch potato with imagination, people who dress up especially when they have nowhere to go. And if that homebody work is doing laundry—refer to the lintball—here’s the wedding dress of domestic work, a 16th century-referencing ballgown that looks like a laundry detergent overflow.
