Comme des Garcons Fall 2004/05 collection was themed 'Dark Romance Witch'.
It expressed the power of witches, their independence and free spirit, which Rei Kawakubo thought was best expressed by the colour black. (A head-to-toe colour palette which made her famous/infamous (?) when she first presented in Paris in the early 80s.)
RK's concept for the collection was "A strong woman is the starting point...So I thought 'witches' in the sense of a woman having power. The original witches were benevolent but because people didn't understand them they bullied them."
She also said, "What interests me with witches is the way they have always resisted the current order. Because they were different in their way of thinking and acting, they were persecuted, hunted, excluded by society."
The collection also returned to concepts RK had worked with previously, and many a time since, Victorian and Edwardian eras, and the boundaries between masculine and feminine.
A very cool fashion shoot from 'Purple' magazine (I think) delivered that boundary crossing. "Obscure Alternatives The new Comme des Garcons' womenswear looks just as achingly beautiful on boys."
Photography, Willy Vanderperre.
Regard the Victorian/Edwardian reference mentioned, the images below relate to The Met Museum 2020 exhibition, 'About Time: Fashion and Duration'.
Outfits were organised in pairs, juxtaposing historical womenswear with a contemporary one, which highlighted a similarity in silhouette and detail.
An outfit dated 1895 and a CdG Fall 2004/05 collection garment are very cool together.
I included a video relating to the exhibition in my SLTSLTB Virginia Woolf blog. Take this link and scroll way down to the video 'About Time: Fashion a...'
I like Lizzie Lo's recreating the CdG Fall 2004/05 look. She knows her makeup and I love how she does her hair.
My garment inspired by the CdG Fall 2004/05 collection. It is one of my first SLTSLTBoys creation. Made during summer, northern hemisphere summer 2004, on the dining table of the house where I was living in Finsbury Park, London, and I still love wearing it!
I have a wee 'mini mannequin' project going with my Yr.8 Fab.Tech. class, and 2 students produced this, which they themed 'Dark Romance'. There's something about the cross that just sets it off.
Witches.
A witch is someone who practises witchcraft, the use of supernatural power to harm others. The term originated in medieval and early modern Europe.
European witch-hunts and witch trials in the early modern period led to tens of thousands of executions. (European belief in witchcraft dwindled during and after the Age of Enlightenment, late 17th and 18th centuries.)
The women most often accused of witchery were frequently elderly, poor, widowed or childless, women who were atypical of society's norms.
A brief history of Witches via youtube.
And for the book minded among us, Literary Hub has a good section, describing a wonderful history of witches found in literature.
Alexander McQueen's Fall 2007 Ready-To-Wear collection was a personal affair. McQueen's mother, who traced family trees, had discovered that her bloodline lead back to a victim of the Salem witch trials. The ancestor was Elizabeth Howe, one of the first victims to be hanged for being a witch.
For a brief history concerning the Salem witch trials, take this site. I found this section very interesting, "In 1711, colonial authorities pardoned some of the accused and compensated their families. But it was only in July 2022, that Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted Salem "witch', whose name had yet to be cleared, was officially exonerated."
Here's a neat video relating to McQueen's exhibition, showing runway, backstage and front-row footage.
(One comment Sarah Mower made concerning the collection presentation was, "... overwrought show that only succeeded in ramming home the realization that the theatrics and stadium-sized presentations of the 90s are - or rather should be - a thing of the past.")
McQueen's collection also features in the Peabody Essex Museum's 2021-2022 exhibition, 'The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming'. This museum is situated at 161 Essex Street, Salem, Massachusetts, so it is the home of original documentation relating to the trials. There is a heap of good reading in this site, particularly poignant being the examination of Elizabeth Howe's transcript. https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/the-salem-witch-trials-reckoning-and-reclaiming
On the 22nd of January, 1953, Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible', a dramatised and partially fictionalised story of the Salem witch trials, was performed for the first time.
I have read that the three main symbols of the play are the fire in the crucible, the poppet and the witch hunt. The poppet, a child's toy, is discovered by Ezekiel Cheever and used as proof that witchcraft was used by Elizabeth Proctor to harm people. When the senior drama class performed the play a number of years ago, the teacher asked if anyone had "a poppet". I produced this for the production. I think it served its purpose very well.
View a very good 1981 BBC TV production of the play, directed by Don Taylor. It is all interior scenes, with the sense of not-yet-electricity-for-lighting, and a design set which presents that enviroment of what was a late Tudor era.
Witch Hunts, as this video acknowledges are so very ugly.
We don't have to go very far to experience such an ugliness in Aotearoa/New Zealand!
A quote from the above "A passage in which Hood compares the tone and framing of child psychologist Miriam Saphira's baseless assertions regarding the prevalence of child sexual abuse in New Zealand to passages drawn from fifteenth-century witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum is breathtaking for its appropriateness."
This is one of the beginning images from McQueen's 'In Memory of Elizabeth Howe' collection show. Could it be a connection to The Three Witches?
The Three Witches, aka The Weird Sisters or Wayward Sisters, are from Macbeth.
It is considered that they bear a striking resemblance to the Three Fates or The Moirae, of classical mythology.
Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Alloter) and Atropos (Inflexible).
Clotho spun the thread of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread, which determined the individual's moment of death.
Henry Moore's 'The Three Fates'.
This is an interesting compare and contrast of the Three Witches opening scenes from five adaptations of Macbeth,
but this performance, by Kathryn Hunter from Joel Coen's 2021 production, is astounding.
Hunter plays all three like she is possessed by the other two, plus, there is an element of crows, and she is a woman living on a battlefield, where the crows are her only company.
Rei Kawakubo revisited Witches in the Comme des Garcons S/S 2016 collection, this time 'Blue Witches'.
Again, she said "Powerful women who are misunderstood, but do good in the world."
Many in the industry regarded Kawakubo as such a woman, "with magical powers who they hold in awe."
Much of this collection was crafted in faux fur, from astrakhan to leopard. The original swatches of the faux fur, sourched in a Spanish factory specialising in the fabric, happened to be blue, which Rei Kawakubo fell in love with.
Once she was aware of the blue fabric, RK said she started thinking about 'Blue Velvet', David Lynch's 1986 neo-noir mystery thriller film, starring Isabella Rossellini.
(A cool aside...isn't this a great shot of Lynch and Rossellini, taken by Annie Leibovitz.)
Blue Velvet has been described as a "surrealist masterpiece".
These are the shoes from the CdG SS Blue Witches collection
Aren't they glorious! I don't know if you remember someone from the McQueen backstage video mentioning the shoes "Witchy shoes, pointy, very high, quite black." Okay, Rei's aren't high, but otherwise, spot on..witchy shoes!
Just like...
This is the wonderfully creative Julien d'Ys, who designed/devised the fabulous headwear for the Blue Witches collection.
A link, which will take you into his glorious sketchbook for the collection, plus an explanation of his working relationship with Rei Kawakubo. They have a great working connection.
And the day I put it together, I was wearing an ensemble connecting with the CdG collection. It's not very clear, but the skirt has a blue and black pattern with a cool ribbon & lace hem section. The black cardigan has puffed sleeves in a knitted lace. The whole look is finished off by my lovely black 'witchy' Italian boots.
Fun and expression through clothing.
Just including this shot to show the blue with a black print, and the bottom edge lace. Whenever I wear this skirt, it always gets a compliment, and it really is an oldie!
This blog has inspired my 3rd 'Redress the Past' project. (Found on my SewRound website, see the side bar)
And I am just going to finish off with these lovely little images from the Dark Romance Witch collection, sketched so beautifully by someone, cut out by me, glued on to card, to become, sort of, paper doll like.
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I love it! Those pointy shoes look perfectly witchy, but would be easy to trip over in!
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