Humble fabrics have been a talking point this European season, many designers employing cotton and linen for grandiose silhouettes.

At the Comme des Garçons show on Saturday night, Rei Kawakubo went way, way further, whorling burlap and calico into wondrous puffball shapes, stacking them up like scoops of hard ice cream – and occasionally adding a cone-shaped hat.

Like her acolyte Junya Watanabe’s show earlier in the day, Kawakubo’s display gathered an emotional tug with her elevation of the everyday and humdrum into dignified, often breathtaking confections with a make-do-and-mend attitude.

Make that: Make-do-and-dazzle.

“I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from the damaging of perfect things,” Kawakubo said in a note distributed after the show, which she titled “After the dust.”

Were the proud women stalking her runway in their dented straw top hats and pink or yellow candy-floss hair emerging from the rubble after the apocalypse? Or escaping persecution in some desert clime?

Some had bundles of detritus bundled on their heads: paper napkins, bubble wrap, fabric scraps and what not. They looked gorgeous.

It’s Kawakubo’s rare gift to summon prettiness from the most unexpected materials and abstract shapes, here including dangling, starfish-like appendages, and what looked like stacked sofa cushions.

It’s rare that one chuckles at a Comme des Garçons show. But there was a collective cheerleading effort for the models as they negotiated the narrow, low-ceilinged runway in their towering straw hats, ducking at a 45-degree angle to clear the concrete joists and fluorescent lighting.

Although most of the attention this Paris season is directed toward the big debuts at many heritage houses, it may be the stalwarts of the Japanese contingent that leave them in the dust.