The $4,000 COMME des GARÇONS Burberry Trench Is Exactly What It Sounds Like
COMME des GARÇONS knows what it likes. The Japanese clothing giant appreciates a good bit of heritage, hence why it's once again selling a customized Burberry trench for a couple thousand bucks.
Why pay approximately $3,870 (¥609,400) for COMME des GARÇONS' take on a vintage Burberry trench over a brand new coat that costs several hundred dollars less? Well, you see, CDG added studs the shoulders, storm flap, and arm of this British-made trench coat and stitched its logo inside. So, there.
This is, of course, not a Burberry trench intended for mass consumption.
CDG super-fans will get it because they grasp the punkishness of only slightly modifying a piece of classic outerwear — as if it were a battle jacket, no less — and appreciate how that appropriative approach fits within CDG's anti-establishmentarian purview, where rules were made to be bent. They also know that the tartan plaid liner is a smart complement to a signature CDG pattern.
Can't you merely slap a name and some embellishment on an existing garment and call it your own? Of course you can. And CDG will do just that.
This is an extension of the semi-anarchist attitude that inspired CDG founder Rei Kawakubo to slash holes in knit sweaters and sell them as completed garments, a tacit homage to the de- and re-constructed wardrobe sold at Vivienne Westwood's World's End store.
Speaking of a British connection, note that this isn't CDG's first stab at a bespoke Burberry trench.
Just over a year ago, it patchworked some interior tartan and scribbled some slogans atop another otherwise unchanged example, albeit one that sold for a few hundred dollars less.
There's a certain level of willful provocation to customizing an existing coat and calling it a new product, something you'd expect of a young designer but not one as established as CDG.
Remember, this is a company so established that it's swung collaborations with companies as powerful as Gucci and Louis Vuitton (of sorts).
CDG has even collaborated with Burberry a couple times.
Once, it creating a hyper-branded holiday T-shirt with a host of labels sold by its Dover Street Markets — which also included Maison Margiela, Simone Rocha, and Jean Paul Gaultier — and prior to that, it brought in Burberry to partner with concerningly still-active designer Gosha Rubchinskiy before he shifted focus to skatewear label RASSVET.
So, CDG could've likely brought in Burberry for an actual collaborative trench coat if it would've liked, especially for the 20th anniversary of Dover Street Market.
But CDG always goes its own way, both because it can and because that's the exact POV that's made it so terrifically successful.
