While the fashion world is undergoing a major rejuvenation with three of the biggest houses Chanel, Dior and Gucci employing designers in their early 40s, it is wonderful to see that it is still being led by the talent and imagination of a woman from Japan well into her 80s. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is especially influential when it comes to men’s wear as the core of her work is based on tailoring and patterns. Or better adjusting and subverting the standards. When hours before the designer Willy Chavarria ended his fashiontainment production with a staged murder which left the audience puzzled, Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons Homme Plus F/W 2026 show had a finale of men dressed in white ruffles which felt a lot like a parade of grooms to the irresistible song Love Me, Please Love Me by French singer Michel Polnareff to summarize her upbeat collection which was a master class in tailoring. And in a way, it was her reminder that in a season awash in suits and ties her creations are ground zero of the genre. 

She did about everything you can imagine to jackets and trousers: hybrids, slashed lapels, askew buttoning, ultra-high and low hems, trompe-l’œil double waistbands, mismatched fronts, heavy embroidery, opera sleeves, cascading double seams, billowing backs, and more easily understandable layered shorts over trousers. To play up the effect, the underpinnings were white to better show the garment’s cut. To continue the audience’s focus on the garments only, the models wore horror movie masks and wigs, a gesture Kawakubo can rarely forego. Between all these combinations, it seems that her favorite jacket comes in the form of a short spencer, which was used in many of the looks. Shoes often had hand-painted slogans like My energy comes from freedom and Kawakubo summarized the positive energy by calling the collection Let’s get out of the black hole.