The Potent Power of Comme De Garçons SS97 "Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body" and its Celebration of the Grotesque Female Body

Photos courtesy of CDG SIX 1/4 (1997)

Comme De Garçons' Spring Summer 1997 womenswear collection "Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body" is one of the most iconic examples of avant garde conceptual fashion. It is widely interpreted as an exploration of the grotesque female body and a parody of patriarchal beauty standards. It can be analyzed through a feminist theoretical lens which incorporates Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque body and Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject. CDG SS97 is an iconic example of how fashion can be a form of horror, humour and critique. By deliberately distorting and reshaping the female form, Kawakubo challenges conventional notions of beauty and offers a radical reimagining of the relationship between body and garment. 

Born in Tokyo in 1942, Rei Kawakubo grew up in post-war Japan amid political upheaval and economic scarcity. This bleak, brutal landscape forged her fearless defiance of convention and her embrace of darkness, imperfection, and the unexpected. After graduating from Keio University in 1964 with a degree in fine arts and literature, she launched Comme des Garçons in 1969, quickly establishing a reputation for conceptual, challenging designs. By 1981, her Paris Fashion Week debut collection, “Destroy,” was met with shock and derision—dubbed “Hiroshima Chic” and “Bag Lady”—yet from that initial criticism she emerged as an avant-garde visionary, cultivating a devoted cult following that would ultimately culminate in her landmark monographic exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, making her only the second living designer, and first woman of color, to receive such an honor.  Across decades, Kawakubo has fundamentally reshaped how we perceive fashion, beauty, and identity, inspiring generations of designers to question convention and embrace the avant-garde, while her mentorship of talents like Junya Watanabe, Kei Nomiya, and Tao Kurihara, alongside her constellation of collaborators, cements a legacy as daring as it is enduring—setting the stage for the radical experimentation of collections like “Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body”.

CDG SS97 directly challenges notions of what fashion is meant to be and the role it's meant to perform. Many critics deemed the collection "confusing, unwearable and unsaleable." Through color, texture, silhouette, and styling, Kawakubo articulates a clear narrative arc of bodily, creative and commercial defiance.  In UNLIMITED: COMME des GARÇONS, Kawakubo said of the collection that, "I realised that the clothes could be the body and the body could be the clothes. This was an idea for possible new clothes. I then started to design the body…It is more important, I think, to translate thought into action rather than to worry about if one's clothes are worn in the end." Here, Kawakubo reveals a shift from designing garments to designing the body itself, exemplifying her conceptual approach and complete disregard for commercial constraints. 

This collection, colloquially called “Lumps and Bumps,” featured stretch lycra garments with goose-down padding sprouting from shoulders, hips, and chests, many crafted in gingham—a pattern evoking 1950s American housewives and the archetypal “domestic goddess,” widely interpreted as referencing reproductive and domestic labor burdens.  Viewed through a feminist lens, the collection “set out to explore and question assumptions of female beauty and notions of what is sexually alluring and what is grotesque within the Western vocabulary” (Granata, Experimental Fashion, 2017, 55). With these subversive garments, Kawakubo throws conventional expectations of female beauty into stark relief: the padding playfully inverts 1980s clothing construction and beauty standards. In a sea of hyper-glossy Amazonian supermodels, this collection is an electrical shock, parodying shoulder pads and tight tailoring that mold the feminine silhouette towards a classical ideal. By surreptitiously placing padding beneath the surface, Kawakubo collapses the dress/body distinction—rather than constructing garments, she constructs the female form, bringing the distorted grotesque into view.

The opening look of “Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body” is a transparent white t-shirt and a full white balloon skirt. The model is clad in glossy white stockings and matching white ballet flats, topped with satin ribbons. Coming down the runway, models' bare breasts are revealed through the fine mesh of the shirt. When she turns, she reveals two large kidney shaped volumes affixed across her back. This look is a visual Trojan Horse. With her entrance, she tricks the audience by complying with the Parisian fashion norms. This sets an expectation for a "normal" fashion show, replete with its contrived shocks and inherent spectacle: nudity, aspiration, material excess. With a simple turn on the runway, Kawakubo reveals her hand: these are not simple clothes. She does not make simple or easily digestible clothes. This collection is meant to provoke. As fashion critic Amy Spindler noted in her 1997 review for The New York Times, "Kawakubo's lumpy silhouettes constituted a radical challenge to Western ideals of beauty." 

Looks 2 through 13 are constructed from stretch lycra. Checked pastel pinks, baby blues, cherry reds and pistachio greens transition to solid supple navies and rich browns. The stretch fabrics reveal the unnatural shoulders, distorted hips, and contorted backs of the models as constructed by the goosedown padding. This color story can be read as a transition from light to dark / day to night / infant to adult / or a loss of innocence. 

Looks 14 through 19 are evocative of mushrooms. They consist of filmy blouses in lurid red, orange, violet and green which float above tawny balloon skirts. These looks imply freedom and wildness, liberation from conventional notions of beauty or propriety. 

Looks 20 through 26 are body skimming dresses constructed from a pale grey twill. The silhouette of these dresses are simple: cap sleeves, high necks and long skirts. However, this only serves to highlight the oddity of the lumps sprouting from stomachs and snaking down legs. 

In Looks 44 through 49, the garments feature sheer mesh blouses, skirts and dresses printed in technicolor geometric patterns. Amorphous swirls and slashes both draw attention to and distract from the body. 

Looks 50-54 are exaggerated renditions of looks 14-19. Enormous brightly colored blouses and skirts engulf the models. They are reminiscent of pliant jellyfish or bulbous sea coral. 

The collection finishes with three monochrome red looks (55-57), these feature the largest padding in the collection. The lumps are the size of a small child: affixed over the shoulder, across the hip and slung across the chest. These looks are widely interpreted as a reference to infants swaddled tightly to their mothers' bodies. 

Artist Julien d’Ys crafted the subversive hair and makeup for SS97. In a 2017 Vogue interview, he recalled that Kawakubo does not let him see the clothes until the day before the show, offering only a single guiding word—in this case, “renaissance.” In response, d’Ys created aggressively slick twists, weaving silver thread through the hair and around the head to contort the models’ faces, while molten reds and unapologetic blacks smoldered from their eyes onto temples and cheekbones. 

Garments designed to shape and contort the female body have proliferated in the Western world for centuries, evolving alongside shifting ideals of beauty—from whalebone corsets to knee-length girdles to modern “tummy control” underwear. Their function, however, has remained consistent: to conceal, contain, and regulate the female form. In contrast, “Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body” foregrounds the physicality of the female body, shifting fashion from commerce to an exploration of living form. Rather than conceal or conform, the collection’s unsealed, unruly silhouettes invite autonomous transformation: the strategically placed pads distort and open the body, challenging patriarchal norms that deem irregularity grotesque. As Kawakubo explained in The History of Fashion (1985), “Fashion design is not about revealing or accentuating the shape of a woman's body; its purpose is to allow a person to be what they are.” By centering the wearer, Kawakubo shifts the focus from commerce to the act of living. With this collection, Kawakubo transforms a physical product driven discipline into something fundamentally ephemeral and unownable: the transformation of the female body.

These grotesque silhouettes are evocative of the body horror films such as David Cronenberg's "The Fly" (1986) and "Videodrome" (1983). Through depictions of the graphic destruction, deformation and unnatural transformation of the body, these films utilize Bakhtinian definitions of the grotesque to elicit shock and horror. The theory of the bodily grotesque was first defined in the 1930s by Russian literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin. He defines the bodily grotesque, or grotesque realism, as the transgression of body borders. In her book The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo further expands the definition of the grotesque body. She writes that "[i]n contrast to the idealized, Classical body which is transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek . . . The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing." Kawakubo’s work embodies this vision, presenting the female form as mutable, dynamic, and uncontainable.

“Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body” is a study of the body and how we see it. Twenty-eight years later, its message remains as potent as when it first premiered. In 2025, we are inundated with narrow and fickle ideas of female beauty. Traditionally, instruments of bodily contortion were external, acting on the surface of the body. Yet with the rise of diet culture, the homogenization of beauty ideals via social media, and increased accessibility to cosmetic procedures, the pressure to conform has shifted inward. Women now face relentless expectations of the ideal female form, enforced through increasingly invasive strategies of bodily submission.

We watch celebrities inflate their bodies with Brazilian butt lifts, only to deflate them years later with liposuction or Ozempic. Social feeds are flooded with headlines like “Why Ultrathin Is In: The Body Diversity Revolution Is Over” (NYT, 2025) and endless photo collages charting Kim Kardashian’s silhouette swelling and shrinking. We live in the age of “Instagram Face,” a phenomenon Jia Tolentino documented in her 2019 New Yorker essay, where young women’s faces are algorithmically optimized and unnervingly homogenized through widespread cosmetic procedures. Tolentino writes: “…technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes”. It is within this context, of widespread body modifications in an effort to ascend closer to the feminine ideal that the message of "Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body" resonates more than ever. "Perfect beauty is not interesting. I prefer imperfection," Kawakubo told the Financial Times in 2004, a sentiment that directly challenges today's digitally homogenized beauty standards. What does it mean to inhabit a female body today? To exist in a world that measures you online, where the act of being visible is both liberation and exploitation? To be constantly compared to an airbrushed, perfected digital ghost—and always found lacking?  Why do we recoil from our own filth, our own unpredictability?  

Kawakubo’s grotesque, swelling silhouettes offer an answer: a radical embrace of the unruly, the ambiguous, the imperfect. Almost thirty years on, her work remains a provocation—an insistence that the female body is not a vessel to be contained or corrected, but a space to be reimagined, distorted, and celebrated in all its unruly glory

Clarissa Kam

Sources

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