Aggression and seduction, armor and arbors, war and peace. Or, to borrow Rei Kawakubo’s phraseology, “the armor of peace.” In a Fall season adrift with armed references, Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons sublimated a certain anxiety of the time, and then decided to say it with roses. Because rather than a treatise on warmongering or protectionism—remember, less than two months ago France announced that it would close its borders, the first time since the Algerian war in 1962—Kawakubo offered escapism. Which, perhaps, is a kind of armor in itself.

Pontificating and hypothesizing aside, Kawakubo’s clothes literally took armor as their decorative motif. Her jackets were sliced and pieced back together, like panels of Renaissance plate armor folding around limbs. Back then, armor wasn’t only worn for protection—in peacetime, it was seen as a sexy addition to a court wardrobe. The first “fashioned” garment was the pourpoint, a 13th-century doublet stuffed with bombast, to fill out the convex shape of a breastplate. Worn by itself, it suggested half-undress—more sex—hence it caught on as attire for nobles with no intention of frequenting a battlefield. A museum in Lyons has the only ones left, made of silk brocade. Kawakubo used the same fabric to make her armor, plates attached to the tailored tails of coats, panels curving around sleeves.

The theme allowed technical experimentation—it was a challenge to articulate every element of an outfit. Shoes were reticulated like armadillos’ shells; coats were punched through with nailhead studs that glinted like buckshot. Kawakubo then garlanded her heroes with flowers—the peace to contrast with the war. The jacquards and brocades of the patching were foliate; the models emerged clutching silk bouquets at the end, like performers in a play taking their final bow, just in case you’d taken the armor seriously: The men were merely players.

The suit is armor for the modern man. The warriors and peacemakers of the 21st century wear suits. Kawakubo hung her notions ideologically and literally onto it, reconfiguring traditional forms—tail coats, blazers—but also toying with their perceptions. If her womenswear frequently chafes against the very notion of “clothing,” offering instead perambulating assemblages of assorted textile, like fashion flotsam that seems to have clustered about the body almost by accident, her menswear is striking in its adherence to the rigid confines of tailoring. In a sense, the suit is a blank canvas, ripe for reworking. It also made these clothes relatable—a Trojan Horse for progressive thought.