Rei Kawakubo imagines beauty not as something to be preserved, but as something that survives.
Between ruin and renewal, Kawakubo locates the essence of creation, beauty as the echo of destruction. Presented in Paris for Comme des Garçons, her Spring 2026 collection titled After the Dust unfolds as a meditation on imperfection and transformation, a continuation of her lifelong search for form within collapse. The collection embraces the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, where irregularity and incompleteness become sources of quiet beauty.
The silhouettes felt both monumental and dissolving. Layers of jute, lace, brocade and raw canvas merged into sculptural bodies that seemed to resist stability. Frayed edges, exposed seams and unfinished hems suggested garments caught mid-gesture, halfway between being made and unmade. Each piece seemed to breathe its own imperfection, beauty revealed not in perfection but in persistence.
This sensibility recalls the Japanese designer’s 2014 manifesto Not Making Clothes, where she rejected the idea of fashion as product and instead pursued it as emotion and philosophy. What she continues to create are not garments but propositions, questions about what beauty can endure once everything familiar has been stripped away.
The atmosphere of the show was hushed and almost devotional. Models appeared as fragments of a post-explosion world, moving slowly through the dust of what once was. From that void, Kawakubo rebuilt beauty from the ruins.
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