Gravity Without Spectacle: Rei Kawakubo and the Discipline of the Black Hole.

Fashion tends to narrate itself through rupture: seasons as revolutions, collections as declarations, designers as auteurs endlessly “reinventing” themselves. Rei Kawakubo has spent five decades quietly dismantling that logic. Her work does not explode outward; it collapses inward. It accrues mass. It bends time.

At Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Autumn/Winter 2026, titled Black Hole, Kawakubo offered less a theme than a condition. The phrase did not function as metaphor alone, but as method. A black hole, after all, is not absence. It is density. A site where matter, memory and force accumulate until form itself begins to warp.

The idea surfaced almost accidentally. Leaving the show, I mentioned the title to a colleague. She replied- offhand, devastating - that a group of British cosmologists had recently proposed a theory in which our universe did not originate from a singular Big Bang, but from the interior of a massive black hole: one collapse birthing another cosmos, endlessly cyclical, neighbour to neighbour. No origin myth. No finality. Just continuation.

It was an eerily precise parallel. Since her first show in 1975, Kawakubo has operated according to this same recursive logic. Her universe does not expand so much as fold back upon itself - returning, revising, re-densifying. Black Holewas not a break from her past, but a tightening of its gravity.

The runway opened in darkness - almost uniformly black - yet the clothes refused flatness. Models wore dishevelled, electrified wigs and rigid facial masks by Shin Murayama, hybrids of American football helmets and Hannibal Lecter restraints. They suggested protection, yes - but also containment. Were these devices meant to shield the wearer from the world, or to restrain what might emerge from within? Kawakubo has always been more interested in the second question.

Under pressure, some things get louder. Others get interesting.

Around these masked bodies orbited garments whose points of origin were unmistakably classical tailoring. Tailcoats, trenches, jackets, dungarees - recognisable forms, but subjected to immense pressure. Velvet tailcoats were cratered with ruched eruptions at the collar, as if punctured by impact. Some were split into narrow trailing strips, their authority frayed. Jackets folded back into themselves in Möbius twists, yokes looping inward until backs were left entirely open, exposing inner pocket structures and seam architecture normally concealed.

This exposure was not decorative. It was anatomical. Kawakubo has long treated clothing as a body with organs, not a surface with embellishments. Here, tailoring was turned inside out, its skeleton revealed. In one instance, an open back was veiled with lace - a gesture that introduced a rare, unsettling sensuality. Less seduction than vulnerability. “Sexy Comme,” someone whispered. Perhaps. But it was sexiness as risk, not invitation.

The collection’s material intelligence reinforced this sense of stress and adaptation. Grey-checked dungarees ballooned into exaggerated volume before snapping back into narrow cuffs, a push-pull between freedom and constraint. Snake-print Lurex jacquard - suggesting a second skin - was shed into jackets with doubled interiors and twin lapels, worn over shorts with diagonally slanted hems that resisted equilibrium. Nothing sat quite still. Everything seemed to be in motion, mid-transformation.

Footwear collaborations anchored this instability. Leather shoes by Kids Love Gaité were hand-painted with Kawakubo’s unusually explicit slogans: Live Free, Strong Will, Wear Your Freedom, My Energy Comes From Freedom. These phrases - typically anathema to Comme des Garçons’ elliptical language - felt deliberately blunt. Were they declarations, or underfoot axioms? Foundations rather than messages? Like much here, they resisted singular interpretation.

Music sharpened the tension. Michel Polnareff’s 1966 Love Me, Please Love Me played at high reverb, alongside other crooning love songs. It was an unexpected emotional register for a designer often framed as aloof, even hostile to sentiment. Kawakubo has never asked to be loved, and certainly not on conventional terms. Punk logic dictates that affection is suspect; resistance is cleaner. Yet the show notes read simply: Let’s get out of the black hole.

Not romance, then - but survival. Or perhaps positivity, reframed not as optimism but as endurance. The clothes bore this out. Trenches fused into dress-like armour crossed the chest in buttoned barricades, while elsewhere the body was left exposed - hipbones revealed, backs hollowed, flanks opened. Protection and vulnerability coexisted, heightening one another. Self-preservation here was not about retreat, but about selective exposure.

This dialectic echoed across the wider menswear season. Prada’s tightly sealed coats, Rick Owens’ deployment of Kevlar as daily uniform - designers responding not to trends, but to atmosphere. Kawakubo has always had an intuitive sensitivity to cultural pressure. Her clothes may look unreal, but the ideas embedded within them are forensic. They operate as distorted mirrors of the present: neither reportage nor escapism, but something more uncomfortable and precise.

As the show progressed, tailoring continued to coil and densify. Fabric gathered into ruched masses, forming near-carapaces around the body. These were garments designed not to perform novelty, but to withstand repetition - to live under strain. Innovation, here, did not announce itself. It accrued quietly, incrementally, like gravitational mass.

Then came the rupture. Or rather, the inversion. After the extended procession of black and grey, the finale arrived in white. Stark, almost blinding. White suits cratered with texture; a white dress as shaggily alarmed as the wigs that preceded it. The effect was elemental. Less purity than reset. Less ending than beginning.

If Black Hole proposed collapse, it also proposed rebirth. Not as spectacle, but as cycle. In this sense, the collection aligned less with fashion’s manifesto tradition than with something closer to philosophy - or physics. Like Montaigne’s essays, Kawakubo’s work resists conclusion. It remains provisional, revised through use, deepened through return.

What Kawakubo ultimately staged was not a vision of escape from darkness, but a manual for inhabiting it: how to survive pressure, how to adapt without dissolving, how to allow form to change without losing integrity. Fashion, she reminded us, does not move forward in straight lines. It bends. It loops. It collapses inward - until something new, and quietly luminous, emerges.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Comme des Garçons.