Ms. Kawakubo is the only designer who thinks like an artist, in that she creates fashion that modifies your view of something, be it women or an aspect of culture.

In 1973, she founded her label, Comme des Garçons; and in recent years, with the help of her husband, Adrian Joffe, she has added commercial ballast to her company, like perfumes, so she can be free to concentrate on her runway collections.

Kawakubo offered an intellectually playful collection of two-dimensional clothes—dresses that were flat as a pancake, jackets with sleeves that looked more like envelopes than like cylinders, and trousers that gave the models the physique of a chalk outline.

In their bright plastic helmet bobs atop clothes cut big and flat, her models looked like a parade of beguiling, clownish paper dolls, their silhouettes as unfettered as preschool cutouts. It was fabulous.

Structured fabrics in clear, dense hues set the tone, but Kawakubo also offered megapatterns, both dots and flowers. One of the best: the blanket checkerboard strewn with roses.

When she tired of flat textures, she went for shine, not of the chichi embroidery genre but a type resembling those giant iridescent gift bags you buy at The Container Store.

And just when you thought you grasped this big-and-flat thing, that it was all in good fun, she sent out some girls in rose prints with their faces shrouded in matching executioner’s hoods, in fabric, for a trace of her signature subversive tension.

A model wears a creation for Comme des Garcons as part of the Fall-Winter, ready-to-wear 2013 fashion collection, during Paris Fashion week, Saturday, March 3, 2012.

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