Comme des Garçons Homme Plus S/S 2017

(Image credit: TBC)

published 25 June 2016

Mood board: It is rare for the cerebral designer Rei Kawakubo to proffer a fixed point of reference for her work, yet this season she had the message boldly displayed across the clothes. Tabards and trousers were scrawled with the words: ‘The King is Naked’, a nod to Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. It is a story about fashion after all. Transparency and pageantry were the message. A raft of tailoring was layered with fine gauze, longline cardigans underneath or PVC trench coats on top.

Best in show: A section of the show included short suits and shirts made in fabric printed with the face of operatic soprano Lina Cavalieri, taken from Piero Fornasetti’s iconic drawings. Fornasetti first became mesmerised with her oddly blank stare whilst flicking through a 19th-century magazine in the early fifties. He went on to reinterpret her more than 500 times. Today, his son Barnaba Fornasetti continues to design in his father’s name and the prints he worked on for Comme have translated Cavalieri into a vivid polka dot, with a swipe of crimson lipstick.

Finishing touches: Models wore high-top, black and white trainers with transparent PVC panels on the side. They are the result of a new collaboration between Garçon Homme Plus and Nike. Dover Street Market — the label’s buzzy chain of concept stores – has teamed up with the American sportswear giant before, but this marks the first sneaker collaboration for the Homme Plus label.

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London based writer Dal Chodha is editor-in-chief of Archivist Addendum — a publishing project that explores the gap between fashion editorial and academe. He writes for various international titles and journals on fashion, art and culture and is a contributing editor at Wallpaper*. Chodha has been working in academic institutions for more than a decade and is Stage 1 Leader of the BA Fashion Communication and Promotion course at Central Saint Martins. In 2020 he published his first book SHOW NOTES, an original hybrid of journalism, poetry and provocation.