Fashion house COMME des GARÇONS presented its Spring Summer 2026 collection, After the Dust, with Rei Kawakubo exploring beauty created through imperfection. She opened the season with a clear declaration: “I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from the damaging of perfect things.”
The collection featured sculptural garments made from cotton, burlap, canvas, calico, linen, and lace. Shapes expanded into rounded forms, split to reveal scarlet satin interiors, or collapsed into layered constructions. Each construction carried traces of rupture, turning breakage into a visible design language.
Kawakubo treated materials as if they were raw matter to be reshaped. Coarse canvas gathered into compressed folds, while lace and brocade collided with rough jute in torn seams. Padded tubes stacked into cones resembled unstable frameworks, and horsehair-like textiles swelled around the shoulders, distorting the body into unfamiliar outlines.
Headpieces expanded the sense of distortion. Models wore towering hats and wigs shaped like padded pillows or sculptural rests, rendered in candy hues of pink and yellow. These elements disrupted proportion, reinforcing Kawakubo’s vision of metamorphosis within the body’s outline. Each construction suggested transformation in progress, reinforcing the idea of garments as shifting, living forms.
The runway atmosphere matched the intensity of the clothes. Silence hung in the room, disrupted only by camera shutters. Without music, the garments themselves carried the entire weight of the presentation, demanding attention through scale, texture, and rawness.
With After the Dust, COMME des GARÇONS advanced its rejection of polished perfection. Kawakubo exposed seams, left edges raw, and transformed rupture into design. The collection showed that beauty can rise from damage, where fragility and reconstruction become acts of creation.
