Are They Shorts?

Rei Kawakubo seems to have an obsession with shorts. For the past decade they’ve been a key feature in her men’s line, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus. Intriguingly, that’s not only in summer collections but winter ones as well.

I’ve been buying them for a few seasons now. They are inventive and made in all kinds of materials. I never expected boiled-wool shorts to be so comfortable and warm in winter when layered with leggings. And I was fascinated recently when Kawakubo embellished some with mother-of-pearl buttons in a manner reminiscent of the outfits worn by pearly kings and queens.

My dear friend André, 27, has been collecting her designs for almost a decade, to the point that Comme des Garçons refers to him as a “brand expert.” Perhaps he can help me get to the bottom of things. André has over 340 items, 30 of which are pairs of shorts. There is a metallic silver pair in light leather, one in dense black fur, another in a rather conservative pinstriped wool with strips of faux leopard fur over the side seams.

His favourites, he tells me over lunch one day, are modelled after the armour worn by medieval knights in battle. They’re from the AW 16 collection, titled Armour of Peace, and made from a black polyester blend with panels held together by metallic rivets. There’s a seam of military references running through Kawakubo’s work, but not in an aggressive way. It’s done in a spirit of rebelliousness. Her vision invites men to have fun with what we wear.

Her designs do elicit a strong reaction. André used to live in a part of Surrey where most guys wore chinos and Barbour jackets, and men would shout comments from their car windows (they weren’t always negative; someone compared him to David Bowie once).

Talking to André helps me understand a bit more about the what, but my curiosity is still not satiated as to the why. I don’t think it’s that Kawakubo, 82, has a particular love for men’s legs. The models in her runway shows have slender “high-fashion bodies” which have never seen the inside of a gym.

The eureka moment comes two weeks later when I visit the Comme des Garçons showroom at Place Vend.me in Paris. Kawakubo is upstairs in her office, watching her team go through her collection with buyers, press and a fabulous VIP client who’s pre-ordering his seasonal wardrobe (he finds this so stressful he took an Ambien before coming to the showroom).

As I go through the rails for the AW 25 collection, titled To Hell With War, I focus on the shorts. There are khaki cargo shorts inspired by army pants, with pockets so large you could put a whole purse in them. There is an actually quite classic pair in bright green, blue and red. It is here that I notice how the shorts’ hemlines and shapes move from being virtually those of trousers to something closer to the traditionally feminine silhouette of the skort, and back to more classic cuts. My theory is that Kawakubo doesn’t see them as shorts at all, but as hemlines she can raise and drop, as other designers do with those of women’s skirts. And because we do not have the vocabulary, we simply refer to them as shorts.