Fashion inspired by fairy tales follows a relatively conventional route: Cinderella and a transformative dress; Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. Rei Kawakubo, however, looked to a different source for her Spring 2017 Comme des Garçons show: Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It’s the tale of an emperor hoodwinked by two charlatans into paying a king’s ransom for absolutely nothing—the emperor is convinced that he has purchased finery that appears invisible to those who are incompetent, stupid or unfit for office, when in fact he is simply parading through the streets naked.

“The emperor’s new clothes” fast became an idiom—and its use to denounce all manner of fashion is ongoing, and vitriolic. Generally, the fashion it’s used to describe is the stuff that doesn’t look the way other clothes do: namely, expensive clothes that don’t appear especially so. Clothes with tears and holes, unfinished hems, deliberately synthetic. Everything that rebels against the centuries-old order of sumptuary luxe. If the actual form of the clothes is abnormal—by which I mean unconventional—even worse. The explicit statement is that we’re all being taken for a ride; implicit is the notion that clothes are only as deep as the material they’re made of.

That such accusations often reach a particularly fevered point in Paris, in overreaction to the conceptual, cerebral depths plumbed at a Comme des Garçons show, cannot have been lost on Kawakubo. One wonders, also, if today she was toying with the fact that the fashion press frowns, concentrates, and tries to extract its own meaning from her clothes—desperate to see the message, the same way the subjects of the Emperor tried valiantly to see his nonexistent garments.

Kawakubo therefore showed transparent clothing—mostly entirely see-through PVC, like ghost garments, suspending details like collars or buttons around her models’ bodies. And much body was on show, through layers of transparency, while striped cotton poplin had the feel of boxer shorts used for pinched suits, as if outerwear had been X-rayed. The emperor did have some opacity to his wardrobe: a Nike shoe tie-in, and a series of printed suits in collaboration with the Italian decorative arts company Fornasetti, patterning suits with their signature etched faces, mouths, eyes. Like the thronging crowds pretending to see the Emperor was dressed.