Did you ever try creating scalloped hems for a garment or played around with a circle paper punch to create a scalloped motif? And did it ever happen to you to notice how the leftover fabrics or the bits of paper left, looked much more intriguing than your scalloped design?
This may have happened to Rei Kawakubo: the designer may have been ruminating about the possibilities offered by these shapes for her latest Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection.
Scallops create wonderful curved edges and if used with solid textiles they can trace well-defined motifs. They are also elegant, but fun as well, and they can add a fabulous finish with their simplicity to hemlines, edges, lapels and necklines.
Flowers were actually a key starting point for this collection: as the show notes stated "Flowers are not there only for happy times. They exist also for tough, sorrowful and painful times. Even a tiny roadside flower can heal our shredded heart."
Flowers are somehow an obvious motif for the Spring/Summer season, but Kawakubo tried to give them a deeper meaning, and remind us that, though delicate and fragile, flowers can bring joy to our lives.
Happiness was symbolised by several floral prints in a wide range of colours, with pink and lilac prevailing in coats, shirts and relaxed pants made in a fabric maybe similar to Tyvek that called to mind paper.
Yet, as Kawakubo highlighted, flowers can also be mournful as suggested by the "fleurs du mal" used for the three-dimensional floral necklaces matched with the black suits integrating pleather ruffles, or by the "memento mori" skull with flowers, a dark and slightly funereal image printed on the back of long white shirts and faux-fur trimmed coats, created by Phoenix-based collage artist Travis Bedel, better known as Bedelgeuse.
Military jackets hybridised with oversized floral trench coats hinted at women's wear collections and at more fantastic Comme des Garçons presentations from the past (during this pandemic year, Kawakubo has been showcasing all the CdG collections remotely). Most models donned Ibrahim Kamara's hand-made papier-mache headpieces, maybe a reference to the fact that Kawakubo had been playing with paper after all, cutting and carving it.
The best pieces remained indeed the designs with scalloped edges: they were just sections of jackets in solid colours or in floral jacquards or shirts layered on another garment like a jacket or a voluminous trench coat. They were used to create intriguing contrasts of patterns or to give a punk edge to a romantic pink tailcoat.
In some cases the scalloped motifs rather than being employed on the front panels of the jackets, were turned into slashes to create cut outs along the sleeves, maybe a way to reinvent diced, sliced and slashed sleeves from the Renaissance.
There was something else that made you think about this historical period: chiaroscuro in art (that is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark) was a very popular painting mode in the Renaissance. And in this collection there was the same duality between the darkness of death, anxiety and sorrow (see the memento mori prints and funereal flowers), and the scalloped designs that looked imperfect, unfinished or maybe finished but eaten away by a cute, funny and hungry Cookie Monster-like character.
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