Commes Des Garcons, “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” , Spring/Summer 1997.
Late twentieth century fashion was defined by a peculiar existential anxiety. The distressed bodies that trudged down the runways of Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela and Commes Des Garcons served as pre-emptive responses to the inevitable global recession that occurred just after the turn of the new century, and the subsequent socio-economic changes. These tawny figures also provided an aesthetic departure from what came before. At times grotesque, they became a vehicle for designers to reject the standardised images of beauty that the fashion industry so dearly championed. On the crux of the millennium, Rei Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection for Commes Des Garcons was the ultimate effort to challenge the elusive feminine ideal of the impossibly glossy, Amazonian supermodels of the 1980s.
Kawakubo’s “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body”, or as it is colloquially known, the “Lumps and Bumps” collection, saw the intersection between her characteristic approach to abstract design and the angst that typified conceptual fashion within this period. Taking a technique as banal as padding – perhaps a nod to its triumphant revival in the eighties – Kawakubo created preposterous silhouettes, through an almost feverish placement of it around the female form. The extremity of Kawakubo’s forms straddles the borderline between soft sculpture and clothes, while their surreal aesthetic toys with the frontier of irony and sincerity.
This play with boundaries is also crucial to the concepts which likely inspired the collection. Theoretically these designs can be linked to Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject and Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the grotesque body. That is, bodies without boundaries. Bodies that exceed their own limits and transgress their borders. Essentially, those figures that are abhorred by the fashion industry. Kawakubo’s distribution of padding around the female figure is poignantly considered to reflect this, each placement making its own resistance against the homogenisation of femininity. Bulges from the hip, stomach and buttocks recalled a curvilinear form no longer in style. On a more sinister note, bumps on the back and shoulders spoke to deformed bodies that are outcast, completely without representation. For the most part the show was kept light with a tongue-in-cheek use of gingham – whose obvious connotations of the domestic sphere further cemented this collection as a tumultuous upheaval of prescribed norms of ideal femininity.
Unsurprisingly, Kawakubo’s provocative vision of the female body wasn’t universally celebrated at the time of its presentation. While Commes Des Garcons and its avant-garde peers regularly bewildered the press during fashion weeks, fashion media continued to promote a commercialised image of beauty. Editorials in Vogue and Elle featured the collection without the pads, which in hindsight was a futile effort to suppress the collection’s political power. However, since then, “Lumps and Bumps” has been rightly acknowledged as a radical effort to rethink prescribed feminine norms in both fashion history and wider scholarly thought. In 2017, select pieces will appear in the forthcoming retrospective of Rei Kawakubo in the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, where their curious lumps and bumps will likely continue to inspire awe and confusion. Not often are we faced with a collection that so powerfully encapsulates a moment in fashion with such fervour and perverse wit.
