After an in-jest complaint to Adrian Joffe about the lateness of this show—it started four minutes early, at 9:11a.m.—he kindly disclosed that the shardlike obelisks of color fronting much of the shirting near the beginning were based on the art of Karl Benjamin. Some of these irregularly rhomboidal abstract hunks of color were laminated to produce a gently eye-catching sheen. Before the Benjamins—and even before the busily bashed-out piano cover of “Paint It Black” had begun—we saw two pleather-led looks featuring the wide-leg shorts and comely jerkin/harness that would feature here and there in other materials later in this show. Benjamin was an abstract classicist, so he made for a fitting contributor to a label dedicated to the aesthetic disassembly and reconstruction of classic shirting.
Examples of that this morning included shirting stripes on high-collar Comme-profile softly tailored cotton suiting, crisply finished hooded pullovers, and softly fish-tailed parka-profile outerwear. There was the old double-collar gambit nicely played via the addition of a wider Peter Pan fold around the conventional one. Shirting fabric was paneled into roughened, softly dyed fine-gauge knits. An arresting pink interlude lasted two suits: the first in drill and blotched with gray, the second in cotton and applied with a black graffiti-style tag print. Through a fugue of pocketed drab-sleeved shirts and round necks we hustled via a fresh khaki jerkin/harness moment toward hybrid shirts in two lengths, with vertical-striped backs and horizontal Benjamin rainbow-striped fronts. A section of collaged pattern patched shirting with purposefully roughened edging followed, before two shirt-striped jackets over punchily printed Benjamin shirting. Two further Benjamin color-block outerwear outings later, and this latest morning service at Comme’s hushed Place Vendôme high temple was all stitched up.