An Elegy Composed in Oversized Buttons and Raw Edges: Comme des Garçons as Modern Poetry
An Elegy Composed in Oversized Buttons and Raw Edges: Comme des Garçons as Modern Poetry
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There are few names in fashion that transcend trend, season, or commerciality. Comme des Garçons—founded by Rei Kawakubo in 1969—is not one of those names. It is the name. A conceptual engine in a sea of repetition, Comme des Garçons has long been less a label than a language, less a brand than a brutalist cathedral of cloth and conviction. Comme Des Garcons To encounter a Comme des Garçons collection is not to “see clothes” but to feel them—a stark, visceral confrontation between fabric and philosophy. In this sense, the label’s work over decades can be read as a prolonged elegy. A meditation on impermanence, destruction, and the raw, unrefined soul of being. And like any great elegy, it uses symbols: oversized buttons, asymmetrical hems, ragged tailoring. It does not mourn with tears—it mourns in stitches.
The Language of Deconstruction
To understand Comme des Garçons, one must first understand that it has always been about deconstruction—not only as a design technique but as a philosophy. Kawakubo has famously described her work as creating “clothes that have never been seen before.” This is not innovation for novelty’s sake; it is a rebellion against systems of order. Conventional fashion demands symmetry, flattery, cleanliness. Comme des Garçons responds with lopsided jackets, exaggerated silhouettes, and raw edges that refuse to be hemmed, metaphorically or literally. The unfinished is not incomplete—it is truer. It tells the story before the story is smoothed over.
In this world, oversized buttons become punctuation marks in a narrative that resists linearity. They are not practical—they are provocative. They distort proportion, draw attention to asymmetry, disrupt the viewer’s expectations. They are monuments to the absurdity of “fit.” In Kawakubo’s universe, a coat might button in the back or not at all. A skirt might become armor. A dress might swell into a monstrous cocoon of tulle and shadow. These garments speak. But what they say is not always gentle.
Fashion as Grief, Grief as Form
An elegy is a poetic form that mourns the dead. It is structure and sorrow braided together, a formal lamentation. Comme des Garçons clothes often resemble such verses—not in words, but in textures. There is something mournful in the label’s obsession with black, in the ghostly white paint on shoes, in fabric that hangs like wilted petals or erupts like barbed wire. Many collections reference the past—not as nostalgia, but as something unresolved. A recurring presence of holes, burn marks, or bruised colorways seems to suggest trauma. This isn’t fashion that remembers—it is fashion that refuses to forget.
Perhaps the most elegiac collection came in Fall/Winter 2014, titled “MONSTER.” Garments billowed into grotesque, bulbous shapes, distorting the female form into something unrecognizable and sublime. These were not clothes as garments; they were clothes as grief, as defiance. This collection—like many before and after—felt like a funeral procession for conventional beauty, led by a designer unafraid of silence, confrontation, or the uncanny.
Kawakubo herself has often remained silent, preferring to let the clothes speak, or whisper, or scream. The raw edge, left fraying at the seam, becomes a metaphor for all that remains unsaid. It is the visible wound, the proof that something was once whole—and then, suddenly, not.
Beyond Wearability: The Art of Refusal
To wear Comme des Garçons is not to adorn the body—it is to challenge it. These are clothes that reject the body’s hierarchy. They obscure, distort, and sometimes even ridicule the very idea of seduction. In doing so, they reject the commercial mechanisms of fashion. There is no attempt to flatter. Beauty, in the Kawakubo sense, is no longer a goal—it is a question mark. A woman in a Comme des Garçons coat is not simply dressed; she is armored in ambiguity.
In many ways, the brand is an ongoing performance. Runways become stages for ritualistic expression: models walking as if mourning, lights dimmed to dusky grey, music reduced to near silence or jarring industrial noise. The clothes become votives—offerings to an aesthetic altar that demands honesty above all. When Comme des Garçons sends a model down the runway in a garment stitched from fragments, laced with exposed seams and frayed organza, it is a refusal. A refusal to be polite. A refusal to conform. A refusal to pretend.
And yet, it is not nihilistic. There is hope here—hidden, but humming. Hope in persistence. Hope in the possibility that ruin can be beautiful. That artifice can fall away. That truth—however fragmented—can be worn like a shroud or a crown.
Comme des Garçons as a Poem
To call Comme des Garçons fashion is to limit its dimension. It is not merely fashion—it is form, language, resistance, and memory. Each collection is a stanza; each garment a line of poetry. The oversized button becomes an enjambment—a pause that splits the expected flow. The raw edge becomes a line break, a moment of rupture. Together, they form an elegy written not in ink, but in felt, denim, leather, paper, plastic.
If there is a central emotion to Comme des Garçons, it is dissonance. And from that dissonance comes power. It is the same emotional territory that poets have explored for centuries—grief, identity, impermanence. But instead of verse, Kawakubo gives us silhouettes. Instead of rhyme, she gives us contradiction.
There are few other designers who have been so consistent in their resistance to aesthetic ease. Even in a market increasingly hungry for the conceptual, Kawakubo’s vision remains untamed. Her garments do not seek validation—they confront the viewer with questions. What is fashion, if not obedience? What is elegance, if not repetition? And what is mourning, if not the act of dressing for something we’ve lost?
A Final Note on the Unfinished
In the end, the raw edge is the final thesis of Comme des Garçons. It is the wound that doesn’t close.Comme Des Garcons Converse The story that continues. The thread left deliberately uncut. It is a visual reminder that nothing is permanent, not even the garment itself. And in that space between rupture and repair, Kawakubo offers something more enduring than style: she offers truth.
An elegy composed in oversized buttons and raw edges does not whisper “goodbye”—it declares, “I remember.” It does not seek closure—it invites contemplation. And in the fleeting, fragile world of fashion, that might be the most radical gesture of all.
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