A history of controversy on the catwalk

The Comme des Garcons show is not the first to cause offence, writes Ma rion Hume

Once again, fashion and political correctness have clashed. The usually inscrutable Rei Kawakubo is upset. The recent Comme des Garcons menswear collection, based, the designer insists, on sleep, has caused such offence that certain items will nev er go on sale.

The designer, a woman of very few words, has issued her second official statement this week, decreeing: "I will endeavour to anticipate any future possible misinterpretations of my work." Meanwhile, Adrian Joffe, her husband and managing director of the company, has spent the week doing TV and radio interviews in France. On Wednesday night, the 8pm national news on TF1 and France 2 featured archive footage from Auschwitz linkedwith images from the recent Comme des Garcons catwalk show.

The background is this. At the Comme des Garcons show on 27 January, the designer showed pyjamas and slippers plus woolly sweaters with numbers and what look like boot marks on them. (The designer insists the latter were inspired by children's play and the prints made by basketball sneakers.) Some of the models hadcropped hair. The show reminded one of my colleagues of schoolboys awoken in the night by a fire alarm. It reminded another of Auschwitz, on the anniversary of the death camp's liberation.

Suzy Menkes, the respected fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, made the latter connection in print. Representatives of the European Jewish congress visited the Japanese designer's Paris headquarters and confirmed some of the clothing was,in their opinion, offensive.

"I am Jewish, our New York press agent is Jewish. Rei said to me, `why didn't you tell me?', but I did not make the connection," said Joffe. All the pyjama stripes have now been withdrawn. A heartfelt apology for distress unwittingly caused has been issued. The matter, one might think, is closed.

Except it isn't. Every season, some designer somewhere will stumble into territory better left untrodden by those in the business of selling highly priced clothes. While nobody doubts Rei Kawakubo's apology is genuine, it is not the first time her collections have sailed close to the wind. When she launched the label, already well known in Japan, in Paris at the beginning of the Eighties, members of the audience declared the collection post-Hiroshima, and the bruised make-up and powder scattered on the clothes distasteful.

Within the culture of the fashion "pond", it is not the done thing to say you do not like a "Comme" collection. The appreciation of the Japanese designers - Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and the Comme des Garcons label - is the mark that one is a fashion intellectual, the frockster's equivalent of the film lover who adores Pasolini or the music buff who hums Hans Werner Henze while doing the dishes.

Some Comme collections are marvellous (the autumn one for 1993 was a fine example, with those who bought the frayed, antique-looking shifts wearing them still). But last winter's collection gave pause for thought, with models wrapped in what looked to melike army blankets and fatigue jackets torn and worn from sleeping rough. Equally sacred to fashion right now is an Italian label, Prada. To say one does not love it, let alone that one does not like it, is to declare oneself a philistine. Yet the shinyblack belted jackets, the to-the-knee utilitarian skirts look like prison warders' garb at best and fascist army uniforms at worst.

While Karl Lagerfeld, the designer at Chanel, has never baulked from riding roughshod over the Coco Chanel myth and can be called to account for two black bomber jackets with black linked Cs that looked distinctly Nazi, he was repentant when Islamic groups informed him that the embroideried symbols on a bustier worn by Claudia Schiffer were in fact words from the Koran. Schiffer and Lagerfeld were swiftly provided with bodyguards, and Chanel sent out letters to newspapers, magazines and photographers re-questing that all images of the outfit, including negatives, be destroyed.

Images of violence are appropriated by the world of fashion, which is often immune to the shock they cause to ordinary people who do not live in the rarefied atmosphere close to the catwalk. Those who saw Dolce e Gabbana's collection last winter wrote ofnatty sharp suits, while the designers themselves nodded to the chic, slick dress code of the Mafia. The widow of a judge murdered by the Mafia condemned the duo.

Fashion designers have often set out to shock; think of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the days of Sex and Seditionaries, or of Alexander McQueen, who has said his clothes at times reflect the atmosphere of violence he grew up in. The amount ofnudity, the bondage straps, the skirts of whips that appear on the catwalk are offensive to some, but they are intended to be.

It is when fashion stumbles into being seriously non-PC that one is reminded quite what an ivory-tower existence those at the pinnacle of fashion design live; Gianni Versace speaks reasonably good English, which makes it more difficult to explain why oneof his favourite catwalk tracks is Phil Collins' "Paradise", which tells of a destitute girl sleeping on the streets, used by Versace to accompany the catwalk appearances of tens of thousands of pounds-worth of haute couture. And we wondered what Valentino was up to when he showed what looked like camouflage tents as ballgowns.

When Yves Saint Laurent decided the fashion salon was a place for political debate he fell on his face; his "Mourning for Vietnam" collection of 1971 was deemed so ill-judged it is often omitted from celebrations of his 30 years-plus oeuvres.

The Americans tend not to offend; when Ralph Lauren was in his cowboys and Indians phase, Navajo patterns were painstakingly researched and no sacred tribal symbols pillaged.

In Paris, Jean Colonna has walked on thin ice with deconstructed clothes that look too close at times to the utility dressing of poverty, while Jean Paul Gaultier, who has taken nuns, Inuit (Eskimos) and Hasidic Jews as inspiration has caused offence. Bernadine Morris, the now retired reporter of the New York Times, wrote after Gaultier's Jewish show that 50 years after the Final Solution was too soon to treat Jewish images irreverently. The collection looked very different when it arrived in New York stores than the way it had on the catwalk.

It goes even further back. When women first donned trousers, the act was seen as offensive. "So called skirts. Or why girls should not wear rationals" is the title of a polemic dated 1906. And in 1947, Dior's exuberant use of fabric was seen as an act ofsabotage to the post-war efforts. It was labelled immoral by the British Parliament.

Rei Kawakubo says she will try to anticipate any possible moral criticism that can be levelled at future work. Up to this point, the designer, who issues obtuse explanations suggesting there is no meaning to her collection has ploughed her own furrow, confident in her vision, asking advice of nobody.

In the light of obvious regrets over the recent menswear collection, it will be interesting to see how C des G goes PC with a women's collection, to be revealed in Paris next month.