The Radical Pleasure of Fashion That Makes You Feel

It’s not often that fashion show notes, the word salads that purport to explain the idea behind a collection but often seem like a pointless justification, offer a gut punch of surprise. But that’s what happened after the Comme des Garçons show, when Rei Kawakubo issued her usual explanatory aphorism.

“Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,” it read. But — there was an addendum — “Small can be mighty.”

For anyone following the news every day, it was impossible not to know what Ms. Kawakubo meant. Seeing her show, it was also hard not to think: Yeah! After all, she was not making a point about miniskirts.

Instead, what came through in her amalgamations of classic fabrics — pinstripe wools, gingham, tartan, jewel-toned velvets — made into what reassembled dresses, or at least dress-adjacent structures, was their human scale.

Each odd, striking piece stood on its own: a shift emerging from the labyrinth of material here, a jacket from the mille-feuille there; a pyramid of black and white tuxedo ruffles, like the upended skirts of a ball gown, sandwiching the person inside, turning her into a monument to dressing gone by. Each one was like a little stack of memories, caught in the process of morphing into something else. What would it be? Who knows.

Comme des Garçons, fall 2025Credit…Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times