Tailored Apocalypses with Zippers That Open to Regret: Comme des Garçons and the Elegance of Unraveling

Tailored Apocalypses with Zippers That Open to Regret: Comme des Garçons and the Elegance of Unraveling

Blog Article

There’s a certain terror in elegance—a polished poise that conceals chaos. This is the kind of elegance Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has always been obsessed with, though she rarely calls it that. Her work, instead, speaks the language of contradictions: tailored destruction, beautiful asymmetry, Comme Des Garcons and silhouettes that behave more like architectural ruins than garments. In the often hermetically sealed world of high fashion, Comme des Garçons remains a brand unafraid to open zippers that lead not to convenience, but to regret, rawness, and revelation.

Fashion as Emotional Excavation

To step into a Comme des Garçons collection is not to witness fashion as trend, but fashion as excavation. Kawakubo digs. Through layers of fabric, through the layers of identity, memory, and societal convention. In many collections, zippers are not simply closures—they're gateways. They unfasten assumptions. They split open societal gender constructs, expectations of the body, and the illusion of polish.

In this world, a zipper does not function to close, but to expose. Behind it, regret often waits—not personal regret necessarily, but cultural regret: the things we once did not allow ourselves to feel, wear, or become. Comme des Garçons is less about dressing and more about undressing the things we’ve buried under silk, wool, and politeness.

The Tailoring of Catastrophe

What happens when apocalypse is not a bang, but a whisper sewn into seams?

In recent collections, Kawakubo has embraced tailoring that flirts with collapse. Shoulders are exaggerated into haunting peaks, suits seem partially digested, fabrics are layered like strata in a wasteland. These garments feel like they have weathered war—not the military kind, but the wars of being misunderstood, being too early, too strange, too unfit for assimilation.

Each runway is a theatre of ruin. And yet, despite the chaos, there is precision in the cut. The apocalypse is tailored. It’s not anarchic. It’s designed—meticulously, deliberately, with the cool hand of a craftsperson who knows that destruction is not the opposite of creation, but its accomplice.

We see this especially in Kawakubo’s use of structured pieces that look like they’re coming undone. The fabric is cut but doesn’t fall. There is weight, but no sag. A carefully frayed jacket may evoke bombed-out buildings or broken hearts, but its internal scaffolding never gives way. This paradox—structural integrity in collapse—is the emotional language of Comme des Garçons.

Zippers and the Mechanisms of Memory

A zipper is an industrial object. Its mechanical nature contrasts the soft pliability of fabric. When Comme des Garçons employs zippers, they often run along unexpected paths: spiraling across a chest, jaggedly dividing a skirt, emerging from the shoulder like a scar.

These are not embellishments. They are questions.

What happens when you unzip a sleeve that isn’t supposed to open? When you expose the lining that was meant to be hidden? What truths spill out when you treat the body not as a mannequin, but as a container of narrative, longing, and failure?

There is a poignancy to these garments. You can’t wear Comme des Garçons without confronting something about yourself—or about how the world prefers you to be. The zipper becomes a metaphor for choice. To open or to remain closed. To reveal what aches or to keep it wrapped in wool and silence.

In this, the zipper is regret’s axis. We carry so much of it in our clothing. The dress we bought for someone else’s wedding. The shirt we wore when we left someone we loved. Clothing absorbs memory, and Comme des Garçons knows this intimately. It doesn’t clean these memories away. It puts them on display. It lets you wear your regret, tailored perfectly to your haunted silhouette.

Comme des Garçons and the Anti-Body

The traditional fashion industry is obsessed with the body—but only a certain kind. Runway models still tend to echo a specific ideal: lean, symmetrical, toned. Comme des Garçons, however, often dresses bodies not as they are, but as they feel.

This creates what some have called the “anti-body.” Clothes that distort, obscure, or de-center the human form. Bulbous growths. Flattened breasts. Garments that hide limbs or create phantom limbs. Bodies that look like sculpture, not flesh.

These decisions are political and emotional. They refuse the idea that beauty is tied to visibility. They reject the notion that the body must be presented for consumption. Instead, they offer garments as armor, as shields, as riddles.

In this way, the apocalypse that Comme des Garçons evokes is not an ending, but a resistance. It’s the resistance of the unideal body. The refusal to be zipped into a cultural narrative that never made room for difference, grief, or asymmetry.

Fashion as Philosophy

To write about Comme des Garçons is to write not just about fabric, but about philosophy. Kawakubo herself often resists explanation. She does not always title her collections. She rarely gives interviews that offer traditional insight. And yet, her work says everything—it’s a kind of fashion that critiques itself while being itself.

The regret embedded in her clothes is not nostalgic. It’s not about longing for the past. It’s about confronting the present and asking: What are we still hiding under these beautifully constructed lies?

Each collection asks us to look inward. To recognize that our carefully curated appearances might be stitched with fear. That we might be clinging to silhouettes that no longer serve us. That opening the zipper might mean facing a truth we’ve locked away.

And yet, Kawakubo doesn’t moralize. She doesn’t demand that we unzip. She merely offers the option. The zipper is there. It waits. Like a quiet dare.

The Final Stitch: Dressing for the End

We often speak of clothing in terms of beginnings: first dates, job interviews, weddings. Comme des Garçons flips that paradigm. These are clothes for endings. For reckonings. For the slow undoing of persona. Comme Des Garcons Hoodie For mourning. For rebirth. For apocalypse—not as destruction, but as truth revealed when the mask falls away.

Tailored apocalypses. Zippers that open not to function, but to feeling. Garments that don’t just fit your body but echo your emotional architecture.

This is what makes Comme des Garçons more than a brand. It is a method of questioning the world through fabric. It is a stitched manifesto that says: “You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t have to be symmetrical. You don’t even have to be understood. You just have to be.”

In a world desperate for smooth surfaces and simple stories, Comme des Garçons offers the exquisite discomfort of complexity. It invites us to unzip the self. And in doing so, we may just find—beneath the regret, beneath the ruin—a kind of freedom.

Report this page