When you start at Hiroshima, deformity blooms. In the black-and-white opening room of the Japanese fashion show, wall labels instruct you to think about a 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics called "In Praise of Shadows," but the dresses are postwar, making me also recall bomb survivors' stories of people instantly reduced to shadows on walls and steps.

Of all the incredible clothes worn by pearly mannequins at Seattle Art Museum this summer—they're here in an abridged version of a traveling exhibition from the esteemed Kyoto Costume Institute's collection—the only piece I've seen in real life, in action, also happens to be the most deformed. It stems from a series, represented by a trio of dresses at the museum, that was dubbed "Quasimodo" when it first appeared in 1997. Its designer is Rei Kawakubo, a fashion demigod whose breakthrough work "gave comfort to the wearer and discomfort to the beholder," according to Judith Thurman in a 2005 New Yorker profile.

While in other realms, as Thurman wrote, "legions of newly minted executives... wore block-and-tackle power suits to the office and stirrup pants to the gym," representing "a giddy and truculent materialism," Kawakubo's "bleak and ragged" 1982 collection was dubbed "Hiroshima's revenge." She "ennobled poor materials and humbled rich ones... crumpled her silks like paper and baked them in the sun; boiled her woolens so that they looked nappy; faded and scrubbed her cottons; bled her dyes; and picked at her threadwork." It sounds as much like the dismantling of the symbols of wealth as the stage directions for a nervous wreck. But Kawakubo has always come off cool. She rarely talks. She has said, simply, that her career has had "one objective: to be free as a woman," and that her clothes are for a woman "who is not swayed by what her husband thinks."

The long black jacket by Kawakubo—whose fashion house name is Comme des Garçons—was worn to my Capitol Hill apartment one night two years ago. About a dozen women had gathered over drinks. Its wearer arrived late, and all the seats were already taken, so she edged herself onto the green velvety arm of a couch, and this stance exaggerated what appeared to be a strange extra padding at her right hip bone.

The jacket immediately inspired fascination—sustained fascination, not passing compliment. Its wearer pulled a small, rounded pillow out of that hip area and flashed it so we could see. She then reached around her body and stuffed the pillow into another part of the jacket, to demonstrate that she could choose which part of her body to pad; there were various pouches. A growth might appear anywhere. Was it protective? Metastatic? The basic standard for assessing a piece of clothing is simple: flattering or not. But that never came up, because we weren't talking about appearance. We were talking about what this alien thing was. It scrambled the system.

I know a dog who is missing both her eyes, named Bump. Bump and another elderly dog, Chloe, were once overheard having a growly altercation in the kitchen. When their owners walked in to see what had happened, there was a bloody lump on the floor, and Chloe had a wound on her neck. The vet later confirmed what the owners agreed was unbelievable news: Bump bit a tumor off of Chloe. Eventually, it grew back. But I find this act as curious, aggressive, and temporarily healing as a Kawakubo lump dress.