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Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body: Comme des Garçons Spring 1997

By Shreya S4 min read
Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body: Comme des Garçons Spring 1997 runway

We do not own the rights to any of these images and they have been used in good faith. Every effort has been made to ensure that all images are used with proper credits. If you are the rightful owner of any image used on our site and wish to have it removed, please contact us at ayerhsmagazine@gmail.com and we will promptly remove it. We are a non-commercial, passion-driven, independent fashion blog and do not intend to infringe any copyright. Thank you for your understanding.  

by Shreya S

“You can tell if it’s a good collection if people are afraid of it. In ten years, everyone will love it.” And this is exactly what happened with her SS 1997 collection for Comme des Garçons.

Back in 1973 when Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons, she questioned everything. She was anything but conventional. Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body is a collection by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons For Spring Summer 1997. The show has extensive use of padding, not Shoulder pads or breast pads but lumpy rolls of padding all over the body the abdomen, the hips, the back, and all over. The collection had a lot of gingham and relatively a lot of color and almost no use of her signature black color.

 The collection now is iconic and a challenge to how we view bodies. Sadly, it is still relevant today with an idea of an ideal body, with the increasing emphasis on the female body and its conventionally sexualized areas. Her work was often provocative but not in a sexual way, it challenged everything. “The clothes could be the body and the body could be the clothes,” said Kawakubo.

She has always been different, her use of the color black, her eccentric silhouettes, and her unusual inspirations. Personally very quiet and drawn from the ultra glamorized the fashion industry, only her work makes a statement, always a strong one. Kawakubo said, “I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design…by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm.  And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion…imbalance… unfinished… elimination…and absence of intent”

What the collection actually was

Shown in Paris for Spring/Summer 1997, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body put kidney-shaped pads of down inside stretch nylon dresses and skirts. The pads sat at the shoulders, the hips, the belly and the back, so each body seemed to swell in places it never does. Unlike the broad shoulder pads of the 1980s, which made women look stronger in a familiar way, these made no attempt to flatter. The fabrics added to the unease: soft pale pink and baby blue gingham, a print that suggests picnics and kitchens, stretched over shapes that looked like growths.

The show was soon nicknamed “Lumps and Bumps”, and it is still the name most people know it by.

How it was received

At first, the reaction was close to alarm. Suzy Menkes wrote that she felt rather uncomfortable, and that the clothes at first read as a kind of disfigurement. Some magazines, including Vogue and Elle, photographed the pieces with the pads taken out, which says a lot about how hard the idea was to sell. Kawakubo was unmoved. She explained that she wanted to design the body itself, not just the clothes over it, which is exactly what the collection does.

The Merce Cunningham collaboration

The idea carried on into dance. The choreographer Merce Cunningham invited Kawakubo to design the costumes and set for his piece Scenario, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 1997. She built an all-white stage under fluorescent light and dressed the dancers in padded costumes based on the collection. The lumps changed the dancers’ proportions and balance and how they could move around each other, and Cunningham admired how the shapes changed every time a dancer turned.

Why it still matters

Over the years the collection has been read as a study of pregnant, disabled and non-standard bodies, and as one of the clearest arguments in fashion that there is no single correct body for clothes to fit. Its influence runs through later designers who play with volume and padding, and through the wider move towards showing more kinds of bodies on the runway. Original pieces now sell for serious money: a complete look, pillows included, fetched £22,000 at Kerry Taylor Auctions in 2016. Almost thirty years on, Kawakubo’s prediction has come true, and people who were once afraid of it now love it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Comme des Garçons “Lumps and Bumps” collection?

It is the nickname for Rei Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection, officially titled Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, in which down-filled pads distorted the shape of the body.

What were the lumps made of?

Kidney-shaped pillows of down, sewn into the linings of stretch nylon and gingham garments at the shoulders, hips, belly and back.

How did critics react?

Many were uneasy. Suzy Menkes described feeling uncomfortable, and some magazines photographed the clothes with the pads removed.

What is Scenario?

A 1997 dance piece by Merce Cunningham with costumes and set by Rei Kawakubo, adapted from the collection. It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 1997.

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Pictures courtesy of Vogue Runway

We do not own the rights to any of these images and they have been used in good faith. Every effort has been made to ensure that all images are used with proper credits. If you are the rightful owner of any image used on our site and wish to have it removed, please contact us at ayerhsmagazine@gmail.com and we will promptly remove it. We are a non-commercial, passion-driven, independent fashion blog and do not intend to infringe any copyright. Thank you for your understanding.  

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One response to “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body: Comme des Garçons Spring 1997”

  1. QUICK BIOS: Comme des Garçons – Marriage Cat Magazine

    […] Rei’s life as a fashion designer happened after her first job in the advertising department for a textile company called Asahi Kasei where she began styling. Three years later, her friend Atsuko Kozasu, a famous fashion writer, offered her a freelance styling position. At this job, there were many occasions when Rei could not find any clothes to suit the question, and she would end up designing something herself. Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body – 1997 […]

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