AW17 Comme Des Garcons Homme Plus Silicone Toy Car Shirt

In the world of Rei Kawakubo, fashion is never just fashion. It is provocation, play, and poetry in cloth, cut, and contradiction. With her Autumn/Winter 2017 Homme Plus collection, titled Boyhood, Kawakubo once again pulled the rug from under our feet. Not with austerity or conceptualism, but with colorful plastic cars, silicone dinosaurs and playful silhouettes.

Titled "Boyhood", the collection explored not simply the aesthetics of youth, but its psychology. The unruliness, the refusal of logic. Where others may have romanticized childhood through nostalgia, Kawakubo chose to interpret it as disruption and portraying it as act of rebellion and expression.

The garments were studies in contrast: floral brocades, shiny materials and sharp tailoring alongside cropped bloomers trousers and midriff-baring shirts, evoking both the formality of school uniforms and the awkward self-awareness of adolescence. Models' donned colorful highlighter yellow, fuchsia, and acid green bob wigs. Not as ornament but as a blunt and loud emotional punctuation.

And then there were the 3D silicone molds protruding from the garments. 

Perhaps the most unforgettable pieces from the show were the garments bearing candy-colored plastic cars, dinosaur molds, trains carriages. They were not hidden, not abstracted, but brazenly displayed. Blue stegasauruses, yellow T-Rexes, and black triceratops clung to tailored fabrics like fossilized dreams.

These silicone toys were more than whimsy. They evoked a child’s mind and never ending curiosity, where logic and fantasy blur. By anchoring a sophisticated garment in something so universally “silly,” Kawakubo asked: Why must adulthood mean disavowal? Why must we shed our softness to be taken seriously?

The shirts, in their playful defiance, suggested that power could reside in vulnerability. And in placing these symbols of innocence on garments designed for grown men, Kawakubo dared to reframe masculinity itself as something mutable, expressive, and even joyous.

This monochromatic striped shirt from the same collection features car-shaped silicone mold riveted on the left chest.

Measurements:

PTP: 52cm

Length: 79cm

Shoulders: 47cm

Sleeve length: 67cm