Rei Kawakubo has never treated fashion as a passive art form. Her work is an argument, a confrontation. Last menswear season, she addressed the horrors of war and the helplessness of those forced to fight. For Fall/Winter 2025, she once again turns her gaze to the state of the world—not in response to a single event, but to a broader reality, one where corporations have infiltrated the political landscape, twisting the news into Orwellian roll calls. The collection swelled with distortion, garments mutating beyond their intended forms, swallowing themselves whole. Dresses bulged with grotesque protrusions, silhouettes sprouted extra limbs, and layers of fabric stacked with geological sensibilities. Excess has broken loose and run amok.

A velvet dress wasn’t simply a dress—it was a tower of flattened frocks stacked one on top of the other, an archive of past lives draped onto a single frame. Then there were the cartoonishly exaggerated bullet breasts, inflating Kawakubo’s deconstruction of femininity into something both absurd and unsettling as if womanhood itself had been distorted by too many hands, too many expectations, too much interference.

Each look seemed to pose a question: What happens when excess runs unchecked? When does accumulation stop being power and start becoming weight? The collection reads like an autopsy of overconsumption, of unchecked growth, of the way grandeur, when pushed too far, collapses under its own pressure. It was the anatomy of excess in its final, desperate gasps—mesmerizing, unsettling, impossible to ignore.

Words by Pedro Vasconcelos

COMME DES GARÇONS FW25

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