Tomorrow’s Black was the show’s title. Tell us something we don’t know, Rei, but a gal doesn’t have to dress that way. Yet out they came, a somber sorority of girls swathed in blackness, cotton-candy Marie Antoinette hair piled high and obscuring their faces. They wore dresses with puffed-up bodices and witchy pointed hems; a man’s suit cut into creepy overalls; plastic underpinnings looking none too comfy; black soccer balls sliced open and recycled into bonnets (even a latter-day Marie has the occasional bad hair day).

 

But she’s a sly one, that Rei Kawakubo. She can manipulate her audience’s reaction like a fist full of bunched-up crepe. Out came a relatively simple shift with random cutouts. A round-skirted dotted dress. A black lace-waisted number under a silver armorlike tippet. When you started to focus on such pieces — the cut, the invention, the drama — you couldn’t help but be taken in by their beautiful weirdness. Kawakubo intrigued when she took the soccer ball motif and ran with it, co-opting its geometric patchwork for capelets, shoes and a full-skirted halter frock. And when she did a dark-side take on frothing up with ruffled explosions on backward jackets and a mysterious hooded coat that could have been accessorized with a scythe. Grim, perhaps. But fabulously so.