Comme des Garçons’ Spring/Summer 2027 collection felt like a message from a company operating under unusually pleasant conditions:
The perfumes are selling. The PLAY hearts are multiplying. The Converse remain on feet. Rei Kawakubo will therefore be spending the afternoon constructing an upholstered question mark.
This is, of course, an oversimplification—but only slightly. While much of Paris spent the season refining desirable wardrobes, Kawakubo sent out a collection of enormous padded structures that hovered somewhere between gowns, furniture and unidentified life forms.
There were polka dots stretched across bulbous silhouettes; dresses compressed inside clear plastic exoskeletons; denim expanded until it became almost architectural. One extraordinary brown-and-white look appeared to have swallowed its wearer whole, leaving only her head, hands and lower legs as evidence of the person inside.
Calling these garments “dresses” feels both technically correct and completely inadequate.
When everyday life gets ideas above its station
Kawakubo’s characteristically concise explanation for the collection was: “When royal life and everyday life become one.”
The royalty was easy to spot. Models wore towering, deliberately makeshift crowns by milliner Nobuki Hizume. There were tassels, feathers, brocades and volumes recalling panniers, coronation robes and ceremonial dress.
But the materials repeatedly brought everything back down to earth: polka dots, pinstripes, rough denim, visible topstitching and sturdy padded fabrics. The visual codes of ordinary clothing were not replaced by royal grandeur so much as inflated into it.
A pair of jeans became a court dress. Familiar spots were stretched across monumental padded curves. Clear plastic was fashioned into a kind of futuristic armour, holding a ruffled gown captive inside it.
It was regal dressing after passing through a soft-play centre, an upholstery workshop and possibly a minor constitutional crisis.
The luxury of not being sensible
Almost none of it was conventionally wearable.
A brave celebrity might manage an adapted version. Lady Gaga at peak Gaga could plausibly take one of the smaller structures onto a red carpet, provided the venue had double doors and a generous turning circle. But nobody looked at this collection and wondered what to wear with the trousers for lunch.
That is entirely the point.
The Comme des Garçons mainline runway is not obliged to behave like a conventional ready-to-wear proposition. It can operate as research: testing silhouette, proportion, material and our tolerance for calling something a dress when it more closely resembles a portable room.
A few days after the show, the showroom reportedly contained smaller and more manageable expressions of the collection. Commerce will eventually perform its necessary translation. On the runway, however, Kawakubo is still permitted to speak in the original language.
“Lady Gaga at peak Gaga could plausibly take one onto a red carpet—provided the venue had double doors and a generous turning circle.”
The business behind the madness
That freedom is supported by an unusually clever commercial ecosystem.
Comme des Garçons generated approximately $450 million in global turnover in 2024, up from around $320 million in 2019. PLAY—the accessible line represented by Filip Pagowski’s heart-with-eyes logo—now produces roughly $100 million in annual turnover by itself.
Then there are the Converse collaborations, wallets, fragrances, diffusion lines and the ever-expanding Dover Street Market universe. Comme des Garçons Parfums, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024, was estimated to generate €13 million in annual sales.
So no, perfume alone is not paying for every padded protrusion. But the broader machine is working beautifully.
What makes the arrangement so compelling is that its commercial success has not gradually domesticated the creative proposition. It appears to have protected it. The recognisable products provide an accessible route into the Comme universe; the main collection remains free to make almost no concessions at all.
The PLAY T-shirt and the impossible runway object are not contradictions. One helps make the other possible.
Long may she do as she pleases
Fashion does not need every runway look to become a product. It needs designers who can still propose something we have not already seen, searched for or been instructed by an algorithm to want.
Kawakubo’s SS27 collection may not tell us what women will be wearing next summer. It does something rarer: it reminds us that clothing can distort the body, occupy space, provoke laughter and resist immediate usefulness.
The dresses were absurd. The shapes were outrageous. Wearability was, at best, a distant administrative concern.
Love that for them.
Sources & further reading
AnOther: At Comme des Garçons, Denim Gets the Royal Treatment · Dazed: Rei Kawakubo Takes the Crown · Financial Times: The $100mn Cool of Comme des Garçons PLAY · WWD: Comme des Garçons Parfums at 30
Runway images: Courtesy of Comme des Garçons via AnOther.