At Comme des Garçons, the runway is rarely just a runway. For Spring/Summer 2027, Rei Kawakubo once again treated fashion as something closer to performance art, presenting a collection under the idea of “When royal life and everyday life become one.”
The show unfolded in two distinct parts, creating a deliberate tension between grandeur and the ordinary. Sculptural silhouettes, exaggerated proportions, layered fabrics and unexpected volumes transformed familiar clothing into something strange and almost ceremonial. There were crowns and headpieces, elongated shapes, fringed and quilted surfaces, leather, denim and sharply constructed tailoring, but nothing felt quite as simple as the references suggested.
This is where Kawakubo remains so singular. She takes recognizable ideas of dressing and removes their expected context. A jacket becomes architecture, a skirt becomes sculpture, and everyday clothing acquires the presence of something designed for a royal portrait.
The styling heightened that collision. Nobuki Hizume’s headpieces added another layer of abstraction, while Takeo Arai’s hair and make-up kept the faces relatively grounded. The Moondog homage soundtrack, (mixed by Ugo Nardini), gave the procession an appropriately hypnotic quality, while Thierry Dreyfus’s lighting made the runway itself part of the artwork.
Footwear collaborations with John Fluevog and Salomon, the latter previewing its FW27 offering, continued the house’s ability to make even accessories feel like objects of fascination.
As always, the audience was part of the Comme des Garçons mythology too. Pharrell Williams and his wife, Juergen Teller and his wife Dovile Drizyte Teller, along with longtime Comme des Garçons collectors, collaborators and VIPs, filled the room.
But ultimately, the clothes were spectacle as usual. Kawakubo has spent decades questioning what clothing can be, and SS27 continues that investigation without offering an easy answer.
Royal or everyday, wearable or art, garment or object, the distinctions are deliberately blurred. That is precisely what makes Comme des Garçons still feel so unlike anything else in Paris.
