Rei Kawakubo built Comme des Garcons on the idea that a garment need not follow the body, and that a shape can be worth making for its own sake. Kawakubo is an abstract drawn in admiration of that work, an interpretation by the Cole & Son studio rather than a collaboration with her, and it borrows the principle rather than any particular dress.
The forms are hand-painted and deliberately unresolved. There is a figure in them, or the movement of one: an arm, the turn of a shoulder, the volume a cloth makes when it leaves the body. None of it is fixed, and different parts of the design assert themselves on different readings, which is the quality that makes it worth living with rather than simply looking at.
It is printed on a non-woven ground, 0.7 m wide, with a full 100 cm straight repeat, so the forms are large and there is real space between them. That scale wants a wall with some run to it. It suits a room with contemporary furniture and good light, and sits well against plain plaster, pale timber and unadorned upholstery, where the drawing is left to do the whole of the work.
