Monumental suit shoulders and cage-like headwear at Comme de Garçons’s men’s FW23 show brought to mind Talking Heads concerts from the 1980s. Particularly, lead singer David Byrne’s own colossal caricature of a suit in the Speaking Tongues tour; a structure so immense that Byrne’s body could wiggle comfortably within, as if dancing independently of it.
“I wanted my head to appear smaller and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger,” Byrne once explained of the suit’s origins. “Because music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head.”
CDG HOMME PLUS FW23’s tendency toward bulging silhouettes and the hirsuteness in lined shirt collars or draped pelts seemed to glorify this corporal preeminence—or aggrandize a body’s own feral impulses. Consider, for example, the black sculptural wiring used to encase models’ heads, which struck you as more restrictive than protectivedefensive. A comment on our cerebral enslavement in the information age perhaps?
If our attention is captive to the demands of our digital existence, it’s no surprise our bodies might have to avenge them somehow. Maybe the rebel yell of punk-inspired plaids, or cannon-shouldered jackets that look as if they can lift us from our overwrought, overthought online personas, can save us—at least sartorially.
Whatever the case, Rei Kawakubo has created armor for the intellectual apocalypse we’re coursing towards.
