Mood board: The large-scale show currently installed at the Met in New York zooms in on Rei Kawakubo’s womenswear, offering very little discourse on her vision for how men should dress. Her focus is often around tailoring and so for S/S 2018 she imagined it inside out and created a twisted disco complete with booming music, a colourful patchwork dance floor and lots of glitter. Models came out and danced on a raised platform in gay abandon, often stopping to have their photographs taken. The soundtrack curated by DJ Frederic Sanchez was pulsating; the energy electric. Thematically, Kawakubo said it was called ‘what’s on the inside matters’ so each of the models wore their jackets inside out, but you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t told. There were paillettes draping the front of shirts, faux fur hyper-colour trim across sleeves and a couple of standout full-on glitter short-suits.
Finishing touches: For almost two decades the brand has been collaborating with sportswear giant Nike across many of its lines from Junya Watanabe Man, Comme des Garçons Black and the Dover Street Market in-house label. Last season Nike Air Force 1s were decorated with bright childlike silicone moulds and for S/S 2018 some of the models wore an Air Max 180 made especially for the label in white with hot-pink trim. Just the thing for dancing well into the night.
Team work: Kawakubo collaborated with the French sculptor and textile artist Mona Luison on three embellished jackets with jutting limbs of dolls and crocheted appendages and a series of prints used across T-shirts and shirts. Luison’s sculptures are always made from recycled objects. Here, she used a collection of toys, embroidered clothing and plastic to create a dystopian three-dimensional comic book; an interrogation into the meaning of life and death.
