“The Karl Benjamin X Comme des Garçons Project” included in “Not to Be Missed”
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 [...]