To me, this photo is a miracle.
This is a photograph of a black shirt. More conservative dressers may be put off by the garment’s odd black-on-black houndstooth and rippling viscose. It’s a miracle you can see the pattern at all in this photo, as in person the shirt shines and reflects with fickle abandon. With such slight alterations the shirt could seem “normal“, yet to do so would surely defeat the point of the garment.
The specificity of these slight inversions is what defines Rei Kuwakubo’s Comme Des Garcons BLACK. These are garments where normalcy is so close, yet made gleefully distant with the inclusions of pant-length zippers, exposed linings, and fabric faces slashed on the backs of jackets. Fashioned mainly in, well, white and black, Comme Des Garcons BLACK emphasizes not just the slight variations of fit and cut, but also experimentations with how we understand and reject material and pattern.
On one hand, the goal of a diffusion line like Comme Des Garcons BLACK is to make available the cuts, styles, and garments made popular by more popular, infamous, and expensive CDG products and shows. The nature of Comme Des Garcons Black is to emphasize the simultaneous universality and oddity of garments we know well. They may not immediately call to mind the world of CDG, and in their specificity call out to the wearer to associate with it more intimately.
Comme Des Garcons BLACK is undoubtedly about intimacy. The stated goal of the brand is “to sell large volumes in small temporary spaces between 25-40 square metres”. While you may find a small selection of BLACK online, you will find the most product crammed together in a Dover Street Market store, innocuous and dark compared to the ornate displays for other CDG lines. In any given Dover Street Market, you will never see the same collection of Comme Des Garcons Black pieces. They are ephemeral and prone to disappearance. You may see a long, thin black pleated coat with a rounded collar and never see it again. I never thought I’d see this shirt again. I took a picture of it, but the quality of the shirt’s viscose mixed with Dover Street Market’s fluorescent lighting obscured the shirt’s true form. It existed in my memory until I found the picture above, online and in almost terrifyingly crisp quality.
Recently, I was overjoyed to learn Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria played in Cleveland last week. Memoria won the jury prize at Canne last year, and includes a brilliant performance from Tilda Swinton, yet the film remains inaccessible to audiences online a year later. Memoria is on a roadshow tour across North America and has been since its release. The roadshow has no plans of ending; the film will bounce from theater to theater, refusing viewers the opportunity to miniaturize the film onto their television or computer.
Memoria follows a Scottish woman living in Columbia who awakes at the sound of a mysterious noise emerging from the jungle. Memoria is her meditation and exploration of these strange sounds which haunt her. As a story, this is no sensational, entertaining film drawing huge crowds. It is an odd little exhibition positioned innocuously from city to city, a film that is long, slow, and achingly troubled. Memoria denies. It denies explanation, pace, comfort, and savoring of the spectacular.
To anticipate Memoria and to feel as though you were “catching” a showing of the film coupled with the actuality of the film is bizarre. The film obsesses over the minute and enlarges passing moments in which our world feels powerfully odd. It is a testament to a strange vibe that Weerasethakul refuses to release us from. It is a film rooted in the quiet and the momentary and implores us to explore our own moments in which the stability of reason or normalcy disappears. Fascinatingly, Weerasethakul still provides a kind of pulp filmmaking wrapped in the veneer of art film, making the moment you leave the theater even stranger. Here is the moment you remember the film as so deeply ephemeral, as an event that succeeds in presenting spectacle, yet denies the cinematic or narrative aspects of that spectacle. And so you wander home, feeling less like you have watched a movie and more like you have been asked a confusing question.
In Memoria’s case, the theater is the space in which film can be watched most actively and intentionally. We are sonically overwhelmed by the screen and sound, other senses dulled, and distraction from the screen is discouraged. The genre of site-specific art takes Memoria out of the world of other 2021 films, out of the world of the known quiet or slow cinema, and into an active and present cinema. This is a cinema understood partially through the way it is seen and makes the claim that it must be seen the old-fashioned way.
In a world of streaming, this reactionary and contrarian release strategy marks Memoria as a sort of performance art merely for forcing those who wish to see it into a theater.
Fashion is often deemed a world of hyper-commercialism and thus intellectual shallowness. Certainly, this is true when comparing the rigor applied to fashion versus cinema. And yet, Memoria and Comme Des Garcons BLACK seem intertwined as reactionary projects that laud traditionalist tactility amid highly technological, globalized worlds.
“Globalized” is the operative word here. Fashion has moved from a world of individualized and isolated styles and designers into one in which every designer must create with the intention of global understanding and consumption. The in-store exclusive is now the upcharged grailed or stockx item, the SSense exclusive so overused it has become meaningless. Similarly meaningless is the concept of the “streaming exclusive“, a label Netflix ascribes to hundreds of projects annually with varying degrees of advertising. If a Netflix exclusive designed for one world goes global (Squid Game, Stranger Things, etc.) it is as accidental as a new designer happening to be sold on SSense. What does this model do to the garment or the film? Both become obtainable anywhere for the right price, their image either buried or oversaturated, their individuality defined by their ability to fit on a webpage next to contemporaries. To find success, the globalized garment is something we require to be understandable equally via an in-person store, online scroll, and artistically daring fashion show. The globalized film must be tweaked and edited to become inoffensive to all, transportative and resonant for any and all, and painstakingly reproducible. Can a piece of art still pierce us in as individual and intimate a manner in this system?
Some find fashion to be nothing if not repetition and cyclical variation. This whimsey-less perception would mark a black shirt like this one as interesting as the plain version, or as interesting as one bought online. Similarly, one might claim a film as being one among many, a minute 100 minutes that will disappear into the memories of thousands of other films. This is a philosophy that turns art into a purely commodified object devoid of craft or joy. It robs the viewer of a reason to connect with something, after all, in a world of infinite options of black shirts, we are drawn to ones we love for specific reasons. Perhaps these shirts tell us stories, perhaps they tell us about ourselves, perhaps they make us ourselves.
In this sense, to have found this beautiful black shirt is in some way a victory. I have not stopped thinking of this shirt’s ubiquitous perfection, and now I can see it and remember that frozen emotion. And yet, it is through the very medium that steals from the shirt the tactility that makes it special in the first place. Its power was its ability to so easily disappear. This picture is, in some ways, like a torrent of Memoria that equalizes it with any other media or “content”. Which is better? The memory, or the picture?