The Eisenhower jacket, camouflage, doughboy pants, the antiwar slogan T-shirt. All have found their way into the battalion of chic, some for their snappy look, some on the wings of a cause. Either way, fashion has long been fascinated with the trappings of war. Rei Kawakubo is not one to put forth her politics clearly; she prefers we ponder her message. It’s a dangerous ruse very few designers can get away with time after time, especially so many years into the gig. But it goes to the core of who Kawakubo is as a designer, artist and crafty self-marketer.

 

The Comme des Garçons collection she showed on Saturday was an engrossing, typically curious dream in which fragility and utility blurred into a complicated vision of beauty, right down to the toes — white chalk outlines on heavy black booties. She opened with three girls who looked like the prettiest anthropomorphic triangles in a Surrealist fairy-tale, done up in what might be called cosmetic colors — puffed-out tulle in barely there buff, their hair painted a feisty pink atop veiled faces. Then came the cape-like army fatigues and coverts, often jackets and triangular skirts, some with graphic outlines of traditional jacket shapes, others with giant tribal-like images of fantastical animals. And more counterpoint: big, comforting blankets in outsized checks and patterns as well as curvy knits that looked like Kawakubo’s twisted take on the sexy secretary.

 

Yet the expected clashes — aggressive and gentle, industrial and earthy, overt and secretive — never occurred. Rather, all coexisted calmly, one forming the foundation for the other (many of the girls wore baggy tulle leggings); all interdependent. The message seemed to be about protection, communalism, and giving the seemingly obvious a second look. Nothing here was straightforward, with coats and jackets cutting away into nothingness in back; knits morphing into different fabrics and shapes; lingerie tulle turning dominant, trapping packed layers beneath in a tubular, shirred stretch of a dress. Entrapment or embrace? The feeling that it was the latter made this collection oddly comforting.