Rei Kawakubo brings back cult Mexican dancing boots at COMME des GARÇONS HOMME PLUS

Rei Kawakubo brought back the ultra-pointy Mexican dancing boots as the sharpest piece of theater in COMME des GARÇONS HOMME PLUS’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show, turning a cult shoe into the collection’s most immediate streetwear signal. Staged in Paris during Paris Fashion Week as a two-act presentation titled If The War Were To End.., the show moved from the historic Élysée Montmartre to a physical installation in the courtyard of Dover Street Market Paris, and the footwear did the work of bridging the rooms.

The clothes softened the brand’s usual combat vocabulary without losing Kawakubo’s edge. Candy-colored camouflage, patchwork tartans, subverted stripes and radical layering gave the collection a more optimistic cast than the title suggested, with the silhouettes still pushed far beyond the ordinary. The show’s visual language felt deliberately altered, as if familiar menswear codes had been stretched, mismatched and reassembled into something less punitive and more playful.

Then came the boots, and the room changed. The style first appeared in COMME des GARÇONS HOMME PLUS Spring/Summer 2015, created with French shoemaker Mexicana and inspired by traditional Mexican Guarachero dance boots. The new SS27 version stays oversized and highly pointed, but Highsnobiety notes it is less extreme than the original, which makes the comeback feel more wearable without blunting the cult appeal. The shape remains dramatic enough to read from across a runway, with the kind of exaggerated toe that turns a shoe into a signature.

That return matters because Kawakubo rarely repeats herself. COMME des GARÇONS is built on reinvention, so the revival of a single footwear design lands less like a rerun than a rare archival flashback, the kind collectors remember and resale markets notice fast. For streetwear buyers, the boot carries a very specific appeal: it is not just another luxury sneaker translation or a seasonal boot with broad commercial logic, but a niche object with provenance, a recognizable origin story and a silhouette that already has myth around it.

The show also fits Kawakubo’s recent run of pointed Homme Plus statements. WWD previously linked Fall 2025 to the blunt title To hell with war, while Spring 2026 arrived as a tailoring-focused meditation framed as Not suits, but suits. SS27 extends that sequence with a lighter hand, but the boots keep the message clear: in Kawakubo’s Paris, the most collectible thing in the room is still the one that looks like it was pulled from an archive, sharpened for now, and placed back on the runway with intent.