CHICAGO _ One recent morning, a man roughly the size of an NFL linebacker shoved me aside so he could exit a crowded subway car first. As we rode the narrow escalator to the street, his broad, meaty back rising like a wall in front of me, I thought, "I bet that wouldn't have happened if I were wearing the pants."
The pants I had in mind were a pair I had seen a fewlesldays before: blood-red trousers designed by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garcons. One might best describe them as overalls, because they hang from shoulder straps.
But there's more: They are large, asymmetrical, pieced together from different fabrics, and angle out awkwardly in a wide trapezoid from waist to thighs before tapering to narrow ankles. One leg is partly made of padded rings held together by straps. The word contraption comes to mind. As a piece of clothing, they are startlingly odd. But that's missing the point: The pants, like much of the Comme des Garcons runway oeuvre, are sculpture, a physical manifestation of the long debate over whether fashion can be art. Whether they are a utilitarian object, pants, or something bigger ... an idea.
The pants are among only a few pairs created for the spring 2015 runway collection, but at this moment, they are hanging in the Near West Side warehouse that is home to Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, a couple of miles from my subway stop, awaiting their day on the auction block on Oct. 25. They are, undeniably, the star piece in Hindman's upcoming couture auction.
"I noticed it when I received the catalog," says Dilys Blum, senior curator of costume and textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has a collection 30,000 pieces strong. "It was the one thing I looked at and said, 'Oh, that's interesting.' The rest is clothing."
Part of the appeal is Kawakubo, who has cornered the market on buzz in the world of high fashion lately. "She's a wonder, she's an absolute wonder," says Gillion Carrara, director of the Fashion Resource Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kawakubo's solo retrospective this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought in 275,000 visitors in its first two months and saw Rhianna walking the red carpet in a Comme runway piece. And September's Comme runway show in Paris, full of curious shapes and wildly layered pop culture graphics, continued her relentless march toward some invisible avant-garde horizon.
Famously, the designer never looks back, so cultish is her devotion to the new. So, once the bright lights dim, what happens to her art? Unlike some couture pieces, which have hand-numbered tags that trace back to the seamstress who put needle to cloth, the provenance of the pants remains a little mysterious. They surfaced at Hindman a couple of months ago, consigned by Audrey Seo, an art historian and collector of high fashion, from Richmond, Va.
Seo bought them less than two years ago, from a private collector, a New York source who "has an association with the brand." Here, she hesitates: "I can't say too much." Fascinated with the idea of collecting couture since, as a teen, she read a Vogue article about Fortuny collector Tina Chow, Seo spent years "working my way in" and now is one of a handful of people who get the call when sources who own such pieces decide to sell.
She was attracted to the pants "because they were just so fun and kind of goofy," Seo says. She is mounting an exhibition of some of her collection, opening this month at the University of Richmond, but typically her pieces are documented in photo albums, then folded into special tissue and stored in boxes made for textile preservation. They take up a converted bedroom in her home.
"The problem with some of the very large Comme pieces like these overalls," she says, "is that they don't lay flat. So they have to go into very large wardrobe boxes, which we have to kind of squeeze into other parts of the house, wherever we can."
It's just a normal-sized house, she says, and lack of space was a motivator in her decision to sell. At Hindman, the pants are squirreled away in a small office jammed with racks of evening gowns, handbags, fur coats, Hermes scarves, Vuitton trunks and high-end costume jewelry. On some of the racks there are little notes with names on them, names often attached to things like large public amphitheaters, or hospital wings, here attached to their castoff handbags.
Despite the quality of the goods on offer, the backstage quarters of the couture department have a feel that's more cleaned-up thrift shop than anything else. The items here have one main unifying characteristic: They are salable.
"Japanese couture does very well," says Mary Shearson, director of couture at Hindman. "We have sold a lot of Comme des Garcons, and some of those pieces are very wearable." She glances at the pants, hanging nearby. "These pants are not one of those pieces. This is sort of an extreme runway piece, a high fashion piece that is not easily worn."
Occasionally, she says, runway pieces are so complicated that the staff, even with its specialized knowledge of high fashion, struggles to get them onto mannequins and style them correctly. Still, Shearson believes the pants will sell easily (the pre-auction price estimate is only $500 to $700), probably to a private collector.
Couture collecting, she notes, is on the rise. "There are extremely interesting people who are just avid collectors of fashion," she says. "To them, it is their art. They get the pleasure of going into a closet and looking at garments that they might never wear, and only they can see and enjoy whatever they love about it."
That feels a little creepy, but OK. The runway shot of the pants is crisp and dramatic, but up close, they are definitely used: slightly limp, showing a hint of wear. They're a tiny bit dirty along one edge. (Though Seo says she never wore the pants _ the right event never came along _ she knows that they were worn at least once by the previous owner.) Other objects in the sale will draw a higher price: Chanel costume jewelry will go for more, a few Hermes Birkin bags (one of the most blatantly monetized objects in the world of fashion) will go for much, much more. But the pants are somehow irresistible.
"I would call them a crazy statement piece," says Carrara. "(Kawakubo's) garments that are experimental are very transformative, as are these red pants. She's created another kind of beauty surrounding the body."
Carrara also notes the connection to fashion history _ in her spring 1997 collection, Kawakubo showed gingham dresses with padding that distorted the expected lines of a feminine body, causing an uproar and inspiring famed choreographer Merce Cunningham, who asked her to make costumes with similar lines for dancers.
"She really destroyed what beauty was at that time," says Carrara, "and she created her own kind of beauty for us to consider." In upending notions of the body, Kawakubo's clothes challenge accepted ideas of feminine beauty, power and identity, and break from the idea of fashion as pretty clothes.
"If these pants were cut close to the body," notes Blum, "we wouldn't find them shocking." And in fact, some of Kawakubo's pieces come with padding as an accessory to be added if the buyer chooses _ sold separately, of course.
Kawakubo, famously silent on her creations, has called herself a businesswoman. That's no lie: Unlike most fashion houses, Comme des Garcons is owned by the designer, and the company produces many more accessible lines of clothing, collaborates on sneakers and T-shirts and has a line of perfumes with people such as former Vogue editor Grace Coddington and Pharrell. The high art of the runway pieces creates buzz for the brand and marks her as that most commercially useful archetype _ the maverick.
Meanwhile, her more wearable clothes have a devoted following among artists, stylists and other creative types. "Wearing one of her garments identifies you as a rule breaker," says Carrara. "She does not fit into the norm in the fashion world. I don't want to either." Among Carrara's Comme pieces is a sweater with three arms, which, she admits, is a terror to get into. The red pants, she says, are a delight to look at but "too crazy for me. I think they'd be so hard to get into and out of and sit and get through a door and in and out of a car."
Which brings this particular piece of art, of course, right back into the realm of the practical. The red pants "are sculpture, and yes you can wear them," Carrara says. They'd be perfect for that next Comme show you're invited to, or a major art opening _ though it might be a once-and-done kind of thing.
"You'd be remembered," Blum says. Then again, art is always most interesting at the place where it intersects with humanity. And where better to bring your pants-as-art to a whole lot of humanity than ... a train. "You'd wear them on the subway, of course!" says Blum. "No one would dare sit next to you. You'd take up two seats. It's a very aggressive piece of clothing to wear."
Don't worry, fellow commuters. Taking up two seats is really not my style. I'll be jammed into whatever spot fits me, making myself small, mostly following the etiquette of the herd. But if you're the high bidder who takes those red pants home, I have one request: Take the train. I'll be watching for you.
