If Paris Fashion Week has a holy day, it’s Comme Day! One after another, in a marathon of artistic defiance, Rei Kawakubo and her disciples take the stage—not to appease the industry, but to assert their own, singular visions. This isn’t about commerce, about trends, about what people might want to wear. It’s about why fashion still matters.
Rei Kawakubo’s empire of thought experiments, housed under the Comme des Garçons umbrella, has long been the intellectual and aesthetic pulse of contemporary fashion. When Japanese designers crashed Paris in the ’80s—Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake—they upended everything the West thought it knew about elegance, construction, even beauty itself. They didn’t just make avant-garde clothing; they redefined the very language of garment-making. Decades later, as so many houses fumble for purpose—this season more than ever—their influence remains seismic.
Comme Day kicks off with Junya Watanabe, the quiet radical. His Fall 2025 collection is Hendrix at Electric Lady Studios—rock and roll and structural geometry fused into something feral and sharp. Leather jackets deconstructed into Cubist armor, trench coats mutating into shape-shifting hybrids, puffers warped into unexpected forms, and coats made of—why not?—inside-out wigs. His remix of rock and rebellion is visceral, a masterclass in technique and conviction. Even at his most sculptural, Watanabe never loses touch with the body, never lets the concept overpower the cool.
He is, at heart, a constructor. While other designers layer on references and hope the meaning will stick, Junya speaks through cut, form, and the physicality of garments themselves. This season’s Cubist tailoring isn’t just an aesthetic flourish; it’s a study in how clothing can be both protective and expressive, aggressive and refined. His approach recalls Brutalist architecture—severe, uncompromising, yet deeply intentional. The final looks, with their blend of velvet, patent leather, and saccharine lace collars, whisper something unexpected—punk, but delicate. Anarchic, but with discipline.
Then, it’s Noir Kei Ninomiya, the former Comme protégé whose work oscillates between technical sorcery and raw, handmade frenzy. He’s been crafting his own dedicated following for a decade now, and his anniversary show is a supernova of contrast. The opening looks shimmer in the dark—translucent biker jackets, resin-frozen petals, netted veils that glow like alien spores. Then, suddenly, a snap—an explosion of color, puffball rosettes, perspex filaments. It’s sculptural, it’s excessive, it’s built with the precision of an engineer and the irreverence of a DIY savant.
Steff Yotka, sitting by me in a netted Comme poncho, shares, “From a distance, Noir looks so luxe and otherworldly. But up close, you see the materials—pipe cleaners, plastic beading. That duality—cerebral and DIY—is what makes it genius.”
Steff’s right. Noir’s materials are often humble, but the results are alchemic. Up close, they feel playful, even haphazard. From afar, they have the grandeur of something far more opulent. This balance of cerebral yet joyful, intricate yet immediate, that makes his work so intoxicating. In a landscape where so many brands are scaling down, cutting corners, leaning into safe, easy minimalism, Ninomiya refuses to shrink. Like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, his work is deceptively simple, built with an underlying complexity that reveals itself the longer you look.
But the main event—the one that makes Comme Day Comme Day—is always Kawakubo. This season, her thesis is “small.” The greatest of the great, scaling down while everyone else scrambles for impact. But in Rei’s world, “small” is never simple. Her smallness is monumental.
Pinstripes, checks, and suiting fabrics balloon into grotesque poetry—wool collapsing in on itself, gingham blooming into strange flora. There’s a tenderness in the violence of it all. Red velvet, ruched satin, strange hybrid forms that suggest a life before and a life after. A tartan box explodes into something organic; a suit sleeve pokes out of a dress like an artifact from another reality. It’s a reclamation—of proportion, of power, of beauty itself.
What separates Kawakubo from the legions of designers now embracing small-scale shows and minimalist presentations is that she doesn’t reduce—she refines. She doesn’t shrink—she distills. When she speaks of “small,” she isn’t talking about commercial limitations or boutique productions; she’s talking about essence. Where others see a trend, she sees a philosophy. It’s the difference between haiku and bad Twitter poetry (or a silly meme)—minimalism as a precision tool rather than an excuse.
Among the standing crowd, the Comme faithful are a walking archive—Victorian ruffle-and-lace dresses from Fall 2004, massive 2D paper-doll coats from Fall 2012, cropped leather pea coats paired with tutus from Spring 2005. Comme fans don’t just show up—they materialize history.
No one else working today makes fashion that asks to be felt and interpreted like Kawakubo. She doesn’t design for an audience. She creates a world and dares you to step inside. In a season that’s felt increasingly devoid of meaning, Comme des Garçons reminds us why we care. And boy, do we give a shit.