Kenzo Spring 2012

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bambi

There are a number of things in the world that I think I love. Things like Easyway Pearl Milk Tea, Hello Kitty everything, playing pool in dirty bars, and lingering in bed all day for snuggling and sweet nothings.

I actually hate all those things. Pearl Milk Tea makes me sick, Hello Kitty is tacky as cherry tattoos behind chicks’ ears, I suck at pool, and snuggling is a waste of time.

I think the issue is concept versus reality. The cuteness of cute ideas is, as it turns out, kind of hard to translate into actual things, and this conundrum leads me to immense identity confusion – I want to love it, but I can’t figure out how. I’m having this problem with Kenzo right now. Since I discovered Kenzo’s fragrance collection about six years ago, I have held the Japanese label on a pedestal and considered it to be the pinnacle of exotic innovation.

Like Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, Kenzo has always seemed to be a cross-cultural immersion of unorthodox style that young women with artistic afflictions and adventurous attitudes toward apparel are programmed to love.

Apparently, I am not. Is it just me? Opening Ceremony’s own, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, took over the fashion house last July, and the Spring 2012 Paris Fashion Week collection marked their debut with the label. Fashion people are salivating all over the place about the results, celebrating the way Leon and Lim honoured Kenzo’s Japanese origins whilst lending their own French influence.

Some of the pieces are cute, bright but restrained enough to translate easily to the high street. There is a subtle underwater theme that runs through parts of the collection, emerging in colours and prints reminiscent of fish scales and coral reefs. To be honest, though, as a whole, the collection doesn’t make much sense – there are too many references apparent in the colours, prints, shapes and fabrics of the garments, and it’s hard to identify who the Kenzo Spring ’12 woman is. Is she going shopping or horse riding? Does she hang out at cocktail parties or camping grounds?

I don’t get it, and I hereby retract my second-order volition of love for the label. Somehow, diabetes-inducing Taiwanese tea and cuddling away my valuable time makes more sense to me now.