For ten years before March 1995, Rei Kawakubo's reputation was fixed. Black, frayed, asymmetric, holes where holes don't belong. Hiroshima chic, the press called it, with the casualness of people who had not yet noticed the term was offensive. Then she sent models down a Paris runway in pink tulle, hoopskirts, Peter Pan collars, and pastel chiffon, and called the collection Sweeter Than Sweet.

Kawakubo herself was unusually plain about the intent. She told Vogue she wanted to express "extreme sweetness, a sweetness that is almost overpowering." Not a concession to the customer. Not a softening of her line. An experiment in what happens when you push prettiness past the point where it stays pretty.

The runway report from the time makes this clear once you read past the materials. There were capes and coats whose construction restrained the models' arms, hampering upper-body movement. The hoopskirts held the wearer at a fixed distance from anything nearby. What looked at first glance like a fairy tale was, on inspection, a series of garments that constrained the body inside them.

This is the part the photographs from the time tend to flatten. Irving Penn shot the finale looks for Vogue's October 1995 issue, and his lighting and pose direction made the dresses read as romantic and still. Stillness in Penn's frame was a compositional choice. Stillness in the original collection was structural, imposed by the clothes themselves.

I keep thinking about the relationship between this show and the 1997 collection that everyone remembers, the lumps-and-bumps "Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body" with the padded protrusions on the hips, shoulders, and back. Sweeter Than Sweet came two years earlier and worked the opposite way. Instead of adding bulges to the body, it built a sweet exterior and locked the body inside it. Both collections asked what a dress was for. The 1997 one is louder about the question. The 1995 one is, if you actually look, the trickier of the two.

The reception in 1995 was confused, and by Kawakubo standards that was a success. Critics who had spent a decade lecturing on deconstruction did not know whether to read a pink coat as betrayal or as another kind of provocation. Some thought she had finally given in. Some thought she was satirising the houses that had spent the decade copying her without understanding her. Both readings missed the point, which was simply that sweetness was a material she had not yet pushed to its limit, and now she was pushing it.

The collection didn't vanish. When Andrew Bolton curated Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between at the Met Costume Institute in 2017, Sweeter Than Sweet was one of the collections the show drew on to make its case about Kawakubo's career, organised by Bolton around nine "in-betweenness" dualities. The garments themselves continued to circulate. A pink two-dimensional coat from the collection sold at Piasa in Paris for around $7,600, which by archival CDG standards is the price of being in the canon.

The thing nobody really argues about, thirty years on, is whether the constraint was the joke or the work. The hoopskirts and the tulle did the obvious work. The capes that pinned the models' arms did the real work. Sweeter Than Sweet is one of the few cases in 90s fashion where you can see the designer conducting an experiment on the audience in real time, with every garment a measurement.

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