Paris Fashion Week: Comme des Garcons' bumpy ride

At Comme des Garcons, Rei Kawakubo left a lot to the imagination, showing dresses and tops that added bulk to the parts of the body most women spend their lives trying to slim.

Lumps and bumps of padding rounded out the hips, stomachs, bust lines and backs of frock coats and tartan dresses, as if the body was too pumped up for the clothes to restrain it.

Other times, the padding coiled around the body like sausage. And still other times, it was arranged in a way that evoked hip panniers on dresses fashionable during the 18th century, when a woman's status was proportional to how much space she occupied, not how little.

The collection progressed to a finale of white, cloud-like dresses bursting at the seams with pillowy fluff, as if the models had the stuffing knocked out of them.

Was Kawakubo commenting on the female condition, the epidemic of obesity, plastic surgery, or the great size debate that has been bubbling up this runway season?

It was hard to tell, and that is part of her brilliance.

-- Booth Moore, reporting from Paris

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Photos: Comme des Garcons' fall 2010 runway in Paris. All credits: Peter Stigter and Jonas Gustavsson / For The Times

Paris Fashion Week: Designs of the times

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the shake-up going on in the fashion industry, how the rise of Internet use and fast-fashion consumption is challenging the taste making role of the elite, and how consumer attitudes are changing regarding the economic and ecological impact of more-is-more spending.

Designers are reacting in different ways (or not at all). Some are live streaming their runway shows on the Web to communicate more directly with the Internet-savvy public, others are using less expensive fabrics to help keep prices down in the hope of luring customers back to the luxury sector. And still others are making statements through their collections.

At Comme des Garcons, a soundtrack that shifted back and forth from lulling classical music to a cacophony of noise, set the scene for a commentary on life's frenzied pace. Dresses and boleros were collages of trends past, including ruffles, frills, polka dots and sequins. Several models wore exaggerated leather shoulder pads, as if designer Rei Kawakubo was mocking the recent 1980s shoulder pad trend wrought by the meteoric rise of the label Balmain, and the cannibalization of the look by purveyors of fast fashion just as quickly.

Paris Fashion Week Day One: The Cultural Tide Rolls Out

The collections in Paris have just begun and already they are 100 times more thought provoking than anything we've seen so far. Designers aren't just showing clothes, they're commenting on the cultural tide.

At Balenciaga, it was another chapter of Nicolas Ghesquière's extraordinary science-fiction fantasy. I imagined Earth in the year 2058, after the ecological apocalypse. No more nature -- just machines.

Life exists in shades of pale and metallic, ready to take on the colors of the flashing lights above. Models don't just look like androids, they are androids -- with nude bodystockings framing their beating hearts. They walk on air pockets, so as not to touch the too-hot ground. They wear strange modular jumpers -- like galactic lederhosen or papery thin pants spliced with black, like shards of the night sky.

The spring season's most impressive jackets came in micro-pleated silver and gold, as if they were molded from variegated metal. There were also wiry silver "fur" jackets and scaly "mermaid dresses" (actually made of ribbon fused with metallic film) -- the exotic skins of the future.

Forget Mickey Mouse, the Marlboro Man and Coca-Cola, the U.S.-born cultural icons that used to unite the world. Soccer is the international icon for today. At Commes des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo played with the hexagonal shapes on soccer balls, flattening and molding them into shoulder pieces, helmets and the bodices of tops.

A sport historically played by peasants, soccer is the great unifier, the great leveler, which made it all the more interesting to see these sculptural clothes in the context of Kawakubo's usual aristocratic touchstones, the powdery wigs and tailcoats.

Junya Watanabe weaved a culural tapestry too, mixing African fabrics with denim, gingham and eyelet, draping, twisting and shaping the fabric into long, bustle-back skirts and feminine jackets. It was a dramatic scene, with cornucopias of dried wildflowers balanced atop the models' heads. And on the sound system, the tribal beat played on.

-- Booth Moore

Top two photos from Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2009 runway show in Paris. Credit: Jonas Gustavsson / For The Times. Bottom photo from Comme des Garçons. Credit: Kirk McKoy /Los Angeles Times