Even those ones who claim they do not care about fashion may feel touched, moved or amazed by a design they may see on the cover of a magazine or on the social media. This simple statement is proved by the comments left by all sorts of people under features about Red Carpet events with celebrities wearing the most extraordinary gowns and outfits.
Yesterday, the first Monday in May, there was one of such events since the Met Gala (also known as "the Oscars of the East Coast" for obvious reasons…) took place. The event officially opened the Met Museum's Costume Institute's annual exhibition.
This year's blockbuster show is entitled "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between" and it is dedicated to the Japanese designer who in the last four decades or so has challenged and redefined fossilised ideas and ideals of beauty, identity and gender.
It is worth remembering that you can't just get invited to this event (by the way, tickets this year were $30,000 each; tables $275,000; this year the event supporters were Apple, Condé Nast, Farfetch, H&M and Maison Valentino), but must be approved by Anna Wintour and Vogue.
This means the gala turns into a show about trending cool and beautiful people who at times end up looking, well, slightly ridiculous. This often happens because celebrities wear designs offered by the brand that has invited them, even when said design doesn't seem to do them any favour.
This year people invited were encouraged to go down the avant-garde path and explore it, and some of them did so with mixed results. The bravest ones opted for Comme des Garçons: Pharrell Williams (event co-chairman) was in Comme des Garçons Homme, with ripped jeans spelling "Rei" on a knee, a plaid shirt-cum-blazer and a motorcycle jacket partially covered in pins; his wife, Helen Lasichanh, was instead trapped in a red jumpsuit with no sleeves/armholes out of the CdG A/W 2017 collection.
Michèle Lamy (Rick Owens' partner) was engulfed in an oversized red frock; Tracee Ellis Ross opted for a Comme des Garçons asymmetrical blue coat dress, while Rihanna and Caroline Kennedy (former US ambassador to Japan) opted for two designs from the A/W 2016 collection, made with floral fabrics that looked salvaged from an upholstery shop, but that actually came (as you may remember) from a Haute Couture factory in Lyon.
Bizarrelly, the few ones who opted for Comme des Garçons seemed to limit their choices to the latest collections, sadly nobody went for the subversive tailored suits from Comme des Garçons' A/W 2013 collection or for something even more iconic like the pieces from the S/S 1997 collection "Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body".
Most of the other celebrities invited went between the classic (Anna Wintour played it safe in a Chanel gown; apparently the last time she wore Comme des Garçons was in the '80s, something that reveals us a lot about her thoughts on the avant-garde…), the elegant or the merely obnoxious.
Madonna was in Jeremy Scott's camouflage (may have been avoided in our complicated aggressively political times …); Kendall Jenner was barely clad in a slashed La Perla gown and Bella Hadid in an Alexander Wang crystal mesh catsuit, but none of the designs left much to be imagined; Priyanka Chopra was wearing a classic Ralph Lauren trench with a massive train supposed to be conceptually cool.
Nicki Minaj must have been forced to wear the puzzling caped black and red dress designed in collaboration with H&M that was cinched at the waist by a belt characterised by a buckle representing a cringing Darth Vader-like head of Rei Kawakubo; Kim Kardashian's almost plain white Versace gown looked rather banal; whoever suggested to Solange Knowles to wear Thom Browne's long penguin padded coat with matching ice skating boots must have thought this was the first Monday in December and not the first Monday in May.
Cynthia Erivo seemed to sprout a jacket from her Thom Browne's gown, as if she had wrestled for a while with a man and a woman's wardrobe, and eventually came out wearing them both; Gucci's Alessandro Michele was in the same dichotomic gender mixing mood as he donned a skirt (matched with an Oriental jacket and accessorised with hybrid leather punk slippers) as a Comme des Garçons homage that actually didn't look like a radically rebellious kilt but verged more towards granny chic.
Even more puzzling was Katy Perry in a red trench by John Galliano for Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal. A decorated veil covered her head and at the side of her face she seemed to have a new version of the Frisian oorijzers (ornamental metal ear pieces), the iron bands with ornate spirals or flat squarish ornaments on their ends that originally served to display family wealth. Maybe this was an attempt at creating a transnational look, but it wasn't certainly a new idea since Walter Van Beirendonck revamped them during the show for his menswear A/W 2016-17 collection.
This display of random madness may have happened since Comme des Garçons does not pay celebrities to wear its clothes, and most invitees are paired by Vogue (or, as stated earlier on, by the brand they are invited by), with a design to wear, so if they look incongruously ridiculous it is often not their fault.
In this situation, though, some of these celebrities looked even more out of place, as if they were trying too hard to look avant-garde. In some cases it was maybe a mistake to transport a CdG design directly from the runway to the red carpet, forgetting that, while they are on the runway these designs are objects you can study from different points of views (material, shape, form and function…); when they end up on the red carpet, well, they seem to lose their purpose, being employed just to give more value to a celebrity.
In a way wearing some of these designs as seen on the runway, without giving them a personal twist, didn't seem too genuine or convincing. A while back SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima donned a Comme des Garçons' padded skirt from the Autumn/Winter 2010 collection at a Venice Biennale awarding ceremony, matching it with a simple plain black shirt, and managing to look edgy, demure and striking.
There are actually people out there such as artist Suzanne Golden or fashion reporter Lynn Yaeger, genuine Comme des Garçons fans, who incorporate what ordinary people may think as outlandish CdG pieces in everyday outfits and who do so in a fun way.
It was while thinking about them that you realised that, apart from the fact that "avant-garde" and "celebrity" are two words that do not always get along well, "the avant-garde" is often a state of mind and an attitude and not a dress or a costume, a design that money can buy or that you can borrow for one night.
The proof of this statement? What Rei Kawakubo chose to wear for the night, a white jacket and black skirt with sneakers, that proved there's nothing more avant-garde than creating your own uniform and sticking with it even at the most glamorous event on the planet organised in your honour.
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