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Rei Kawakubo is no stranger to protest - her guerrilla approach to garments and their display, as well as her strange and headstrong introspection continue to force fashion forward. Friday's Homme Plus show played out on a narrow V-shaped catwalk inside La Samaritaine (that decommissioned bastion of Paris retail history on the verge of renovation) and told a double-edged tale of extravagant military regalia and its darker trench side twin. Shod in elongated Chelsea 'botas picudas', with their curled-up hornlike toes, Kawakubo's peaceful soldiers wore raw-cut banker stripe suits strapped into overalls, field jackets trimmed in brass buttons and many a lustrous jacquard; from pink hound's tooth, glossy leopard and lattice chains glinting off spliced jacket sleeves and backs. Sounds glam? She planed that brass-band pizazz with ensnaring honeycombs of mesh overlay and painted cries for peace on her finale of shorts suits. 'Anything war can do peace can do better,' she proclaimed. We'll buy that.
