Conceptual Armor Built from the Cries of Abandoned Cities: A Comme des Garçons Manifesto

In a world increasingly shaped by silence, loss, and the weight of urban memory, the avant-garde fashion house Comme des Garçons steps into a spectral void with a haunting concept: "Conceptual Armor Built from the Cries of Abandoned Cities." This is not merely fashion. It is elegy, rebellion, and spiritual archaeology woven into fabric. Rei Kawakubo, the visionary founder of the brand, once said she wanted to "make clothes that didn’t exist before." Comme Des Garcons With this latest conceptual exploration, she and her label reach beyond garments and touch something more visceral: the collective memory of civilizations that vanished into wind, concrete, and decay.

The result is a fashion experience that doesn’t just wrap the body, but protects the soul. This is clothing for a post-apocalyptic poet. Armor not against bullets, but against forgetting.

The Language of Absence

Cities, like people, breathe. They sing, cry, rot, and disappear. Detroit, Pripyat, Hashima Island, Aleppo—these are not just locations but lost voices in the symphony of civilization. In this collection, Comme des Garçons draws inspiration from these muted urban landscapes. There are no literal ruins on the runway. Instead, each piece distills the essence of absence. Deconstructed silhouettes mimic the shattered skyline of a crumbling metropolis. Torn seams recall broken glass. Ghostly white fabrics speak of snow-covered silence.

But the most striking element of the collection is not what’s seen, but what’s evoked. Every drape, texture, and asymmetrical line echoes a different kind of mourning. This is not grief for the dead, but grief for the abandoned—the hollow shells of homes that once pulsed with laughter and dreams. Comme des Garçons has always used the runway as a stage for emotional complexity, and here, it dares to present urban decay not as tragedy, but as testimony.

Architectural Alchemy in Fabric

The idea of armor is central—both metaphorical and physical. As buildings fall, the body becomes the last bastion of memory. In this vision, the human figure is transformed into a walking ruin, encased in wearable architecture. Garments jut out with deliberate awkwardness, evoking the jaggedness of collapsed concrete or rusted rebar. Some pieces appear reinforced with stiffened panels, like exoskeletons. Others billow in shrouds of sheer tulle, like the dust clouds that follow demolition.

Materials shift between hardness and fragility. Weathered leather, industrial mesh, crinkled metallic fabrics—these evoke both durability and decay. One look might pair a rust-stained tunic with a delicate cage-like overlay, its structure both confining and strangely liberating. Comme des Garçons dares us to ask: what does it mean to dress like a city on the verge of forgetting?

In this collection, fabric becomes narrative. Kawakubo turns design into archaeology, inviting us to imagine each textile as a preserved layer of civilization, stitched together with the echoes of abandoned conversations, protests, sirens, lullabies. These are clothes that whisper. Clothes that remember.

The Emotional Topography of Protection

Armor implies danger. Yet this armor does not protect from physical attack—it shields against emotional erasure. We wear it to remember the people and places the world has left behind. Comme des Garçons challenges the traditional notion of clothing as comfort or decoration. Instead, it positions clothing as memorial, as confrontation, as reclamation.

The body becomes sacred terrain. Where once there was bustling traffic, now there is the rhythm of breath. Where voices once filled marketplaces, now a heartbeat pulses beneath padded shoulders. Each piece in the collection becomes a map of what remains—and what we fear to lose.

In many ways, this is a deeply political gesture. To build armor from abandonment is to reclaim agency from history. In a world that forgets too quickly—news cycles, refugee crises, war-torn cities, rising seas—Comme des Garçons refuses to look away. It drapes us in vigilance. It asks: What do you carry forward when the skyline collapses behind you?

The Haunting Silence of the Runway

The runway show itself unfolds like a requiem. There is no music—only the echo of footsteps. Models emerge not as people, but as apparitions. Some wear veils; others walk stiffly, like survivors stumbling through ash. The lighting is low, funereal, casting long shadows across the garments, transforming them into moving statues of grief and resistance.

There are no smiles, no ease. Just the heavy presence of absence. Each step down the runway becomes a march of memory, a silent procession of witness.

This theatrical starkness is not new for Comme des Garçons, whose shows often blur the lines between fashion and performance art. But in this context, the silence is thunderous. It speaks louder than any soundtrack could. It makes you feel the weight of what has been lost.

Beyond Fashion: A Call to Preservation

This collection is not about trends. There are no wearable pieces for mass consumption, no nods to mainstream streetwear or celebrity endorsements. This is a collection that demands presence, reflection, discomfort. It dares to exist outside of commerce.

In doing so, Comme des Garçons reinforces its position as fashion’s philosopher—an atelier more interested in asking questions than giving answers. And the question posed here is urgent: What is the role of memory in the age of collapse?

As climate change threatens cities from Venice to Jakarta, and as geopolitical unrest continues to displace millions, the abandoned city is no longer a relic of the past. It is a preview. Comme des Garçons invites us to dress for that future with reverence, with armor, with awareness.

The Cries We Cannot Ignore

To build conceptual armor from the cries of abandoned cities is to create a language for what we cannot articulate. It is to take the intangible—echoes, memories, losses—and give them form. It is to recognize that style is not just about aesthetics, but ethics. Not just about bodies, but about histories.

Comme des Garçons has always thrived in the in-between—between beauty and distortion, between fashion and protest, between chaos and order. Comme Des Garcons Hoodie With this collection, it turns fashion into resistance. Resistance against forgetting. Resistance against numbness. Resistance against the erasure of place and personhood.

In a world where cities can vanish overnight and voices can be silenced with a drone strike or flood, this collection is not just relevant—it’s necessary. It teaches us how to wear grief without drowning in it. How to stand tall in the ruins. How to become both memorial and monument.

And above all, it reminds us: nothing is truly gone if we remember it.