This evening, Kawakubo continued with her odyssey, and it became a blood-soaked one, like a Jacobean revenge play of sorts. Roses and blood were her key words backstage, and it was important that roses came first because there was a struggle going on in this collection to turn something disturbing into something beautiful—it seems that this is Kawakubo's own personal creative struggle expressed time and time again. Her familiar motif of the rose or rosette was there from the first look, cascading down in long flowing red ribbons of fabric, and this was the most conventionally beautiful look of the collection. It was all red, as was the entire offering—apart from one ominous black hood toward the end, echoing an earlier version of a red riding hood that appeared in patent leatherette. There was not even a major variation in reds; it was the same rose red, or poppy red, expressed again and again in widely different textures and silhouettes that ran like exploded and tattered versions of an invented history, one of Kawakubo's own making.