For Fall/Winter 2012, Thom Browne took the expression “dying for fashion” literally, staging an elaborate funeral tableau complete with flickering candles and ten coffins containing, as an officiant announced, “ten beautiful girls who died for fashion.” The models subsequently emerged from their coffins, resurrected by their love of clothing, in extravagant ensembles featuring exaggerated hourglass silhouettes, embroidery, and gilded embellishments. Juxtaposing the solemnity of Victorian mourning with his characteristically surreal theatricality, Browne transformed the runway into a narrative about fashion’s power to bring its devotees back to life.
For Comme des Garçons’ fall 2015 collection, The Ceremony of Separation, Rei Kawakubo explored an abstract interpretation of loss through 18 sculptural looks in black, white, and gold, colors associated with burial across different traditions. Models approached, passed, and separated from one another as though enacting a final parting between the living and the dead in voluminous constructions of intricate lace, oversized bows, and densely layered fabrics which enveloped the body. Among the standout looks were a white dress resembling bundles of bedsheets tied with bows, a tiered gold-lace structure recalling religious vestments, and a black ensemble adorned with miniature Victorian-style children’s dresses and bonnets. The show culminated in a voluminous black tulle cocoon, its shroud-like silhouette reinforcing the collection’s meditation on mortality.
