Thom Browne’s golden baby shoes sit center stage, encased in a glass vitrine. Each model will stare at the shoes as they walk past, Browne says. “It’s an homage to their childhood,” he explains. “They are really reminiscing on when they were in childhood — before deciding to go one way or the other.” The gold-plated flat men’s shoes and the heeled brogues are similarly encased, like art objects.
For decades, at least since her Paris debut in 1981, Ms. Kawakubo has forged her own path, a durable antagonist of established norms and received wisdoms. Her line Commes des Garcons has gone into and out of favor over the years, but she has been at the forefront of important developments in fashion all along. She arrived early to ideas still potent and percolating within the fashion ecosystem: androgyny, artificiality, the pop-up shop, the luxury group (she has encouraged several former assistants, most notably Junya Watanabe, in the creation of their own separate lines under the aegis of Comme des Garçons).
“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past forty years,” said the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, Andrew Bolton. “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”
The show will open May 4th at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Avantgarde for other people is when they step out to far. To me Avantgarde is the side of yourself, you are afraid to show. Pharrell Williams/ MET Gala, New York
Tim Walker for i-D magazine on the State of British Youth.
Balenciaga Fall/ Winter 2017
Rag & Bone’s chief executive and designer Marcus Wainwright has all-but-declared the fashion show dead. This season, instead of trotting out his latest men’s and women’s collections onto a runway, he asked 70 friends of the brand to pose in Rag & Bone for a series of Polaroids and portraits shot by collaborators Glen Luchford and Frank Lebon.
Nearly all of those subjects showed up in their looks for a party on Thursday night at a space right around the corner from the brand’s meatpacking district headquarters. The 15th anniversary exhibition, which also features blow ups of campaigns and visual projects from over the years, will be open to the public for a couple of days. But tonight, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was DJing in his black suit, Mikhail Baryshnikov was sidling up to the bar, and “The Americans” star Matthew Rhys was dutifully posing next to his portrait.
“I don’t really see it as a collection,” Wainwright said, one of his three children standing by, wearing a checked coat with its red-velvet collar turned up, as well-wishers streamed in. “For some reason, in my head, the idea of a fashion show collection isn’t really relevant to me.”
Instead, the lineup underscored Wainwright’s commitment, more pronounced over the past few seasons, to simply deliver things that are good-looking and unfussy, like a real-camel wool Chesterfield-style coat (worn by CFDA chief executive Steven Kolb and inspired by Wainwright’s grandfather), a Linton tweed jacket (spotted on Rhys’ partner and costar Keri Russell) and an exaggerated crosshatch-weave skirt suit (modelled by the artist Tali Lennox). Back at the showroom, other bits — indigo-dyed corduroys for men, a jersey-sleeve hooded stadium coat for women — also made good on his promise.