Comme des Garçons

Dissonance made Spring/Summer 2021 one of Kawakubo’s clearest pandemic-period statements. The Tokyo presentation carried the pressure of distance and reduced spectacle, but the title sharpened that condition into a design problem rather than a logistical footnote. Clashing forms, restraint and visual unease gave the season its rhythm, with harmony deliberately withheld. The garments seemed to hold contradiction in place: quiet but not calm, simplified but not resolved, intimate in scale yet charged by the wider disruption around fashion’s ordinary rituals.