Bump and mind

ArtForum, Dec, 1996 by Hilton Als

In a season characterized by a turn to "democracy" - Calvin "Just Be" Klein and innumerable ad campaigns that have mined, in ways too vulgar and injudicious to recount here, photographer Corinne Day's rethinking of fashion photography in terms the press has called "realistic" - Kawakubo's engorged garments for Comme des Garcons stand apart from her contemporaries' race to embrace the fiction of an empirical real as "new." This "fashion" is a smoke screen; in actual fact, fashion, as practiced by any designer but Kawakubo, does not exist, especially if the practice of making clothes can be defined as an idea that has been given form - the configuration of a thought, or several.

Kawakubo does not design clothes but events in which people appear. On the videotape of the collection shown in Pads this past fall, the audience's verbal reactions to the work functioned as the soundtrack; there was no music accompanying the models as they - one at a time - walked down the short white runway, their skirts rustling beneath their funereal faces, lips bleak, eyes greasy. The first outfit exhibited a woman in a white skirt, its hemline gathered in a bunch just beneath her knees. She also wore white stockings, flat white shoes, and a transparent white stretch top with white ribbed sleeves. The pods, also white, were attached to her back, beneath the nylon, polyurethane, stretch tulle top; her breasts (the frontal view) corresponded to the pod shapes. Further along, another girl: rainbow-colored polyester, polyurethane, and organdy stretch top, a slight opening at the chest, and a right shoulder of Quasimodo-like proportions, a shoulder stuffed with pods. (The beauty of the fabric will further confuse potential customers. These bumps are hard not to like. At any rate, it is hard not to find Kawakubo's imagination attractive, given that it is somewhat invidious.) Yet another girl sported a pod placed directly on her stomach; when she stood in profile, she looked as if she had been defeated by pregnancy, or was simply disinterested in the effect her cosmetic pregnancy had on us. In these clothes, people exist for better or for worse. The exact opposite of "fashion," which does not demand that its wearer infuse clothing with individual style, but takes the short, ugly view: that women do not know what they look like at all, so they might as well look like Everywoman. Versace, whose fashions-as-fantasy subscribe to this thesis, has made a great deal of money banking on the fact that women see themselves as men see them, which is to say as whores in repose, mouths in motion. His fiendishly bright colors are not as Mediterranean as one might think. Could they be the palette in which men paint a woman's interior self - violent, aggressive, "bitchin'"?

Buffalo Bill, the evil tailor in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs bitches because he is unable to distinguish between what he is and what he would like to be: if not exactly the bleak-lipped, greasy-eyed woman held captive in a blood-stained pit, then some kind of woman. But before becoming the woman he envisions himself as, he must wear her body like fashion: he stitches a bodysuit together from the skins of his victims - complete with breasts, fuller hips, larger thighs. The complicated emotional charge of this male/female's way of being lies in his nonresolution. Like many men who consider themselves female-identified, he relegates maleness to metaphysics: his corporeal self is incorporeal because no definitions, least of all as they pertain to the body and what constitutes the "natural," apply. Like the moth and butterfly larvae he so carefully tends in his basement garden, this man/woman will never metamorphose into a full-blown woman, will remain frozen somewhere between reality and desire, just as Kawakubo's designs exist somewhere between our acceptance of them and horror at having marshaled "acceptance" or "rejection" as the criteria for looking at anything. If Kawakubo is asking us anything, it is to see. A dick is a bump, a fact the female-identified male viewer may (again) realize with grotesque glee when looking at Kawakubo's bumps. He/she may also ask, What kind of man am I to love the way women would look in Kawakubo's bumps? And, What kind of thinking woman would I be if I did not eventually wear these bumps myself? These questions do not demand a response since the questions (and the added strain of trying to determine how one resembles Buffalo Bill) are enough to place one close to the heart of the bumps' essence, an essence very few men, or even women, will understand - a sartorial, gynecological, emotional freak-out.

The chrysalides Buffalo Bill cherishes bear more than a passing resemblance to Kawakubo's bumps or pods. While watching the collection on video, it was difficult not to be pulled into the vortex of isolation each of the models wore, like the weight of makeup - an isolation that raised questions beyond the banal or expected.

What would I Iook like in these clothes? What does my body mean to me? Knowing that what constitutes most social interaction or conversation is self-criticism ("I'm miserable!") and criticism of others ("They're miserable!"), Kawakubo, a most astute social and political reporter, provides metaphors made of fabric that represent how "awful" we assume we look: large bumps or pods that have very little relationship to the body even as it comments on its incongruities. A head is a bump, an ass two even bigger bumps. Would anyone want either if, in their misery, they were not occasionally deemed "cute" by someone we assume is distant from our various selves? The validation we seek from others is often the first and only attempt we make to gain perspective on who we are - but just for a moment. That moment is subsumed by our wish to be part of the social world, and that demands self-hatred.