The Comme des Garçons Shirt show began, as usual, a couple of minutes before its advertised start time of 9:15am. That so many people wake at the crack of dawn on a Saturday to schlep to Place Vendôme in the January drizzle is proof of the power of Comme des Garçons, which is less a fashion brand and more a church.
Shirt is a commercially minded faction of the Comme creed and each season takes on the challenge of finding new ways to make the button-up look interesting. For this outing we started with blazers and peacoats with contrasting plastic pockets before moving onto shirts decorated with abstract shapes in primary colors that were sometimes numbers, sometimes letters before moving onto others that spliced stripes with tartan. Next were shirts with cutout pastoral scenes and more in bright block colors—one with a double set of contrasting sleeves, presumably so you could change the color of your arms on a whim. Khaki quilted jackets and crumpled wool tailoring in windowpane checks came later, along with shirts covered with wish-you-were-here postcard illustrations depicting holiday locales from Hawaii to the Panama Canal.
In all of this was a lesson in how to do logos: Shirt spattered them all over this collection, but they were rendered in such a diversity of ways that it dodged any sense of being overdone. The emblazoned football scarves in particular will be popular with Comme supporters the world over.
What makes the Shirt output so appealing (beyond the meditative, no-fuss atmosphere of this early morning show at the brand’s HQ) is that each season it offers consistently inventive yet eminently buyable product that, though it reinvents the shirt, doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It was another consummate showing of Comme’s design divinity, and a morning service worth getting up for.
