"...The small audience of elite editors and buyers, squashed together
like bugs, stares at this strangeness [in the Comme des Garçons runway
show]. No face seems to say, 'Hey, what gives here?' There is fierce
applause.
Backstage, Rei Kawakubo awaits the people who will come
to congratulate her, and to seek an explanation. The founder of Comme
des Garçons hardly ever goes out on the runway. She is a tiny woman, a
force of will.
An editor asks in earnest about shape, silhouette.
Ms. Kawakubo mumbles something in Japanese, which her husband, Adrian Joffe, next to her, translates:
'She says she couldn’t think of anything new, so she decided not to make any clothes.'
It
was a complete Gump moment, as when the Tom Hanks character decided to
stop running and return home to Alabama, leaving his followers stranded
in the middle of nowhere. What did it mean? It meant absolutely
nothing."
Also, between
Comme des Garçons bascially punking everyone and Rick Owens' decision to
showcase his Spring 2014 designs on
several gorgeous step teams (instead of on a fleet of emaciated teenaged models, which is unfortunately the norm), it sounds like this might have been the best Paris Fashion Week of all time.