At Kenzo, clothes. That might sound silly, but this show is always striking for the fact it’s full of things you’d be able to buy right now and put on straightaway. That’s not from lack of imagination or direction, quite the opposite – Carol Lim and Humberto Leon’s tactic of tweaking current trends and successful signatures only slightly from season to season ensures their customers come back again and again to buy not dissimilar pieces.
It’s canny, as the gap between show and shop contracts ever further, and it’s careful too. And it ensures a certain amount of desirability – the denim, laser-cut logo broderie, neoprene and the skirt shape (a sort of flamenco-hemmed, just-longer-than-mid-length, with a slit at the front) felt right for now in a way that makes you want it now. That’s a great skill, so for all that the Kenzo sweatshirt, asymmetry, tailoring and other boxes were ticked, there was a more meta-method too.
There was a climate message too, flashed up on big screens that showed landscape scenes and industrial processes, dictated by an avatar of a model backstage in live-motion capture gear and beamed out to us. This felt a little confused and became slightly lost, but it looked pretty cool.
