“In the modern age clothing has become man’s second skin, from which he will under no pretext separate himself and which belongs to him like an animal’s coat, so that nowadays the real form of the body has been quite forgotten” (Théophile Gautier 1860)
But this is no second skin: clothing so monstrously baroque it mocks our sartorial rectitude of health and classicism. Rei’s Lumps and Bumps (1992) first expressed the profound disjuncture between dress and the body. That, despite our tendency to naturalize clothing, over time it inevitably appears wholly alien; strange anthropological studies. Then in 2012, 20 years on, her flat manifesto collections saw the body under renewed attack. Asphyxiating felt steamrolling limbs and compressing lungs; clothing winning the dialectical war. And by ~2015, Rei abandoned the anatomy altogether, jettisoning the saleable sweet jetsam of Shirt, Play, Tricot, Homme et al. CdG runway pieces stripped of armholes with necks built high above transmogrify their host. Acephalic giant laceballs with drooping relapsed glands. The body not forgotten, but obliterated. monstrous Beauty.