Rei Kawakubo married Adrian Joffe at the Paris city hall on the fourth of July, 1992. The bride wore a black skirt and a plain white shirt. He had joined Comme des Garçons five years earlier, in 1987. That detail of the wedding outfit is the part most people skip past, because it sounds like a refusal of bridal theatre, when it is actually the opposite. It is the costume of a woman who has thought about clothing for thirty years and decided that on the day she gets married she will wear what she always wears.

The collection she showed for Fall 1992, the one in shops by the winter of her marriage, was called Lilith. The reference is the female demon of Jewish folklore, the night-figure whom God, in some readings of the Talmud, made out of "filth and sediment" because Adam complained the first woman was too much like him. Kawakubo had been quietly working with myths that side-stepped the bridal one for years. Lilith was the moment she made the side-step the entire architecture of the show.

Vogue described the clothes as semi-destroyed, and very sophisticated. Predominantly black, with flashes of pink and strokes of white polka dot. Chiffon layers yoked to cone-shaped knitted turtlenecks that masked the face from the nose down. Sorcerer's sleeves, that long medieval drape from shoulder to floor that the rest of fashion had let go of sometime around the early seventies. The colour she gave the collection was nightshade, a botanical word doing the work of a moral one.

Sandra Bernhard walked the show. Kawakubo had met her when Bernhard came in to be dressed for an event, and put her in a men's suit instead, which Bernhard later said she preferred. The casting tells you something: Kawakubo had spent the late eighties putting Basquiat and Malkovich on her menswear runways, but rarely brought non-models into the women's shows. Bernhard in Lilith was an exception, and the choice rhymed with the collection's premise that the woman it dressed was not the one fashion expected.

The finale was the part everyone remembers. Cocoon-like silhouettes with the models' arms crossed inside the garments, walking in formation as if held. "I do not find clothes that reveal the body attractive," Kawakubo had told Vogue once, plainly, and the cocoon walk was the most literal statement of that position she had ever staged. The body was inside. The garment was a wall around it. You looked at the wall.

What I find striking, looking back, is the timing. By 1992 Yamamoto's eight-year argument with Paris had also been won, and the two of them, who had debuted together in 1981 to cries of beggar-look and Hiroshima chic, were no longer a Japanese incident in European fashion. They were the house style for anyone interested in the body as a problem rather than a display. Lagerfeld was running Chanel like a stage. Versace was running Versace like a magazine cover. Kawakubo was running her own house like a thesis, and the Lilith show is maybe the cleanest single statement of the thesis she made in that decade.

What I keep coming back to is the trick of the collection. The clothes look, in photographs, as if they should be sad, and on the runway they were not. They were funny, in a stern Kawakubo way, and grand, and self-contained. A demon-myth, retold by a woman who had married five months earlier in a black skirt and a white shirt, and was wearing both as a uniform rather than a renunciation.

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