Rei Kawakubo
The founder of Comme des Garçons built a fashion house on deliberate discomfort, repeatedly dismantling what clothing is expected to do to a body.
Rei Kawakubo has spent more than fifty years using fashion to ask whether clothing is a shell for the body or an argument against it. Her label, Comme des Garçons, has produced some of the most unsettling and influential collections in the history of dress, while her retail venture Dover Street Market has reshaped how avant-garde fashion is sold and encountered.
Origins and formation
Kawakubo studied literature and aesthetics at Keio University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964 — an unusual background for a designer who would go on to rewrite the visual language of the garment. She worked briefly in the advertising department of an acrylic fibre company before beginning to design clothes for herself when she could not find what she wanted to wear. By 1969 she had registered the name Comme des Garçons ("like boys" in French) as a company. She taught herself to sew and pattern-make without formal fashion training, a fact she considers an advantage rather than a gap.
The Paris debut and its aftermath
Comme des Garçons showed in Paris for the first time in 1981. The collection — dark, asymmetric, deliberately unfinished, with torn edges and irregular hemlines — prompted the French press to coin the phrase hiroshima chic and le destroy, both intended as insults. Kawakubo absorbed the hostility and continued. The silhouettes she put on the runway that season, and throughout the 1980s, established a new vocabulary: clothes that wrapped or obscured the body rather than displaying it, fabric that dragged and bunched, garments that were neither front nor back.1
Her 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body went further, padding garments with lumps and protrusions that repositioned the body's apparent mass — hips where there were none, a hump at the shoulder blade, a swelling at the stomach. Fashion critics and anatomists were equally disoriented.
Method and philosophy
Kawakubo designs primarily through concept, often arriving at a collection by articulating a question or a paradox and working toward a garment that embodies it. She rarely explains her collections in press notes; the opacity is part of the work. Her collaborations with manufacturers in Japan and elsewhere involve intensive development of fabric and construction technique — many Comme des Garçons pieces rely on proprietary textile treatments unavailable to other designers.
| Year | Collection / Concept |
|---|---|
| 1981 | Paris debut; dark deconstruction |
| 1997 | Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body |
| 2012 | White Drama |
| 2017 | Met Gala retrospective; Art of the In-Between |
Dover Street Market, the multi-brand retail concept she launched in London in 2004 with partner Adrian Joffe, brings together Comme des Garçons with a curated selection of other labels in a space that is redesigned each season. Locations now operate in London, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Los Angeles, and Singapore.
Legacy
In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York devoted its Costume Institute exhibition to her work — Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between — only the second time in the institute's history that a living designer had been given a solo exhibition. The show framed her output as a sustained investigation into dualities: self/other, design/not design, clothes/not clothes. Kawakubo did not attend the opening.
Her influence runs through Martin Margiela, Junya Watanabe (her protégé), Noir Kei Ninomiya, and a generation of designers who treat the garment as a conceptual object rather than a commercial one.
I am always searching for something new, something that does not yet exist.
Footnotes
- The 1981 collection was compared unfavourably to poverty by reviewers who had not yet developed a critical language adequate to what they were seeing. ↩
