Rei Kawakubo traded Comme des Garçons’ usual starkness for a riot of tulle, lace, glitter wigs, platform Nike Cortez, and overblown flowers for Autumn Winter 2018.

Her starting point was Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on “Camp”, a fifty-eight-point meditation on a concept that celebrates artifice, exaggeration, and kitsch. In Camp, fashion is seen not simply as clothing but as a deliberate performance where style and behavior are exaggerated and stylized to make a statement. 

Rather than being “bad taste,” Camp treats this excess as something joyful and meaningful, finding beauty and pleasure in the “too much.” It’s less about whether fashion is objectively good or bad and more about embracing its theatrical and expressive power.

Kawakubo’s twist was to strip away the irony. She described Camp as “something deep and new… a value that we need,” contrasting it against styles like punk, which she felt had lost their original rebelliousness. 

The timing mattered. AW18 arrived amid political heaviness and cultural cynicism. Just as Camp once provided a subversive space for queer aesthetics, Kawakubo used it to remind us that joy, excess, and play still have a place in serious fashion.

By blowing up silhouettes into towering crinolines and layering clashing prints like a living collage, she reframed fantasy as a serious, progressive language for fashion.

This beautiful shirt features undone hems with black tulle lace peering through the shiny red surface.

Tagged Size L

Measurements:

Length 74cm

Shoulders 42cm

Chest 49cm

Sleeves 63cm

Hem 54cm