sejima wears comme

Sejima wears a comme des garcons piece made for her by Rei, attending the Pritzker Prize ceremony, along with Ryue Nishisawa, at Ellis Island in New York last Monday. Long known to be an avid Comme fan and personal friend of Rei,the choice is no surprise, if not expected. Though the pair had collaborated on the Comme des Garcons exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo last year, I eagerly await the eventuality of these two visionary minds putting their hands together to create a more permanent Comme space in the future.

braided sweater 1983

This braided knit sweater would not look out of place if it appeared on the runway today for the current fall/winter collection or even the next fall/winter collection. Looking like a cross between SNS Herning and Fabric Interseasons, it is actually from the comme des garcons fall/winter 1983 collection, looking as relevant (perhaps irreverent) today as it was more than 25 years ago. There is a sense of timelessness, but not of the kind one would normally associate with classic lines and simplicity, and being able to fall within the narrow and constantly shifting bounds of social and aesthetic conventions over time. Timelessness, in this case, is achieved by operating at the margins of or beyond these conventions, outside the realm of trends (but I must caution that there is a fine line between this and being purely wilful and irrelevant). The clutch of simplicty is shrugged off and the garment, rich in expression but decidedly undateable, bears the ability, and indeed demands, to be revisited time and again.

comme des garcons x beatles

“For Rei Kawakubo’s hotly anticipated collaboration with The Beatles, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. In fact, the logo of Apple Corps Ltd. — the London-based company that manages the legacy and musical catalogue of the British band — sits next to Kawakubo’s signature polkadots on a range of travel bags, the core of the collection, along with shirts and T-shirts.

Priced from around $115 for a T-shirt up to $860 for the most expensive bag, The Beatles/Comme des Garçons label is to launch Nov. 20 in Tokyo at the Trading Museum, a new Comme store concept in the Gyre building. Dover Street Market, Kawakubo’s multibrand emporium in London, is to host the British launch on Nov. 27, with a further commercial rollout planned for 2010.” WWD

Two heads are better than one, and at Comme des Garcons, two brands, it seems, sell better than one. No strangers to collaborations, co-branded temporary lines have become the mainstay of the CdG family.While I have enjoyed and have been surprised by many of their past collaborations, even more leave me cold and thinking it is some sort of souless money making scam, an evil necessary only to keep the mainlines running. But recent news of CdG's collaboration on a line of bags and tees with the Beatles left me puzzled. I am immediately reminded of the Rolling Stones collection of the Homme Plus ss06 collection and the earlier Pink Panther collection (currently being reissued in the Home Plus Evergreen line), both of which were full collections with the benefit of having classic comme construction as a foundation and a breadth of pieces

The Beatles collaboration, as a line of only bags and tees sounds like something produced just to make money with little work involved except to tack on logoes onto a rather banal product that had already been designed. Having seen this lone picture of the outcome of the collaboration, I am tempted to think it might be something a little more than a just a blatant merchandising venture, but my skeptics's hat refuses to come off my head.

Rei, Rei, Rei..... when will you stop.

BLACK comme des garcons in singapore

Came upon this while doing my rounds at the Hilton Arcade. BLACk cdg will take over the old Giorgio Armani space at the Club21 Hilton/fourseasons stronghold, peddling the less bank breaking line of classic comme pieces done in black, with the label meant "to last as long as the recession lasts". While a BLACK mens line has yet to been announced at the moment, I hope the unisex pieces do not run me into the red. It'll be the ultimate irony for a line that purported to be a response to the recession. On a side note, I think it'll be pretty awesome if they just reuse the fittings in the old Armani store and just paint everything black.

BLACK was previously mentioned here

cdg homme+ ss10

Moving on from last season's dark moody tones, the ss10 CDG Homme+ collection is a sumptuous feast of summery hues and rich textures. Patchwork plaid jackets are matched with loose floral print pants. On some jackets, ties are stitched on as part of the patchwork and looking as though they were casually slung over the shoulders. Pockets are articulated as seperate colour panels or outlined with a contrasting trim. Trompe l'oeil bow ties can be seen on shirts, sometimes humorously juxtaposed with a real bow tie worn with the shirt. There were also some short skirts (or skorts?) layered over pants, which are still a bit of a hard sell, even if this is the fourth season in a row where skirts have appeared for the homme+ collection.

Although lacking in the tricky tailoring we saw in last season and the usage of many recycled classic comme shapes, this is by no means a poor collection. Beneath the cacophony of the layering and styling is a rich picking of great individual pieces that would fit right into any fanboy's wardrobe.

BLACK comme des garcons

the tagline from the Dover Street Market mailer reads: "A new brand featuring perennially popular Comme des Garcons styles in black. The brand will continue for about eighteen months."



40 years of Comme des Garcons, and a temporary label "to last as long as the recession lasts" (Adrian Joffe, from WWD.com).

it's perhaps one of the most striking features of Comme des Garcons projects that they meld visual oddity along with market savviness and a finger on the pulse of popular consumption in the same body. PLAY was pretty bland, but half a floor in Dover Street Market and a white box in Paris suggests it's sold enough polos with miscut hearts to last awhile. the H&M collaboration popped off the shelves at Oxford Circus the same morning it dropped. as much as one feels like throwing stones and crying "cop out", it's a consistently well executed piece of marketing genius, without losing much of the edge that Comme des Garcons has exuded over its history. the closest comparison (although much younger by far) is the t-shirts that Jun Takahashi's Undercoverism machine puts out.

interesting, then, that while news from Yamamoto-san is all bleak and black, this new line in the same dark hues is a direct and almost-defiant response to the economic downturn. again it isn't groundbreaking stuff, but cloaked in the usual slightly stilted diction accompanying Comme des Garcons lines, it hopefully remains intriguing enough to work.

kitonomics in action awaits?

Rei of Light

tee hee. Rei of Light by Item Idem