‘With creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight’
Rei Kawakubo, The New York Times, 2009.
Rei Kawakubo has a career defined by radical innovation and a battle against the ordinary. When she created Comme Des Garcons, she defied convention with her interpretation of silhouette, the act of dressing women as individuals, the notable de-sexualising of the form in comparison to other western designers of her era and introducing new Japanese design ideas to Paris.
The Cultural Backdrop for a New kind of Artist
Rei Kawakubo was born in 1942 in Tokyo Japan, she studied fine arts and Aesthetics at Keio University in Tokyo where she graduated in 1964. Five years later, she launched her fashion label ‘Comme des Garçons’ meaning ‘like the boys’.
Over the next decade she would open 150 stores across Japan. Kawakubo emerged from a time where women who chose career over family were still heavily critiqued and has spoken about how this built a sense of anger in her that would become a driving force for her creativity.
After the end of World War II, Japan went through a period of rebuilding and emancipation, in 1945 women were granted the right to vote and by the 1970’s, feminist movements had started building momentum. Average people started questioning social conventions of dress after the Vietnam war and garments that didn’t allow women to participate freely in society were deemed oppressive. However high fashion was an archaic institution that had been moving in the opposite direction, toward tighter fit with more formality. Kawakubo’s Avant Garde work would go on to challenge this trend with clothing that represented the counterculture shift in social attitudes.
The Avant Garde; Challenging Convention
Rei Kawakubo was an Avant Garde designer and to be an Avant Garde designer, was to be in opposition to conventions. The conventions of western society at the time of her introduction on the international stage, was predominantly a woman who was dressed by a man, not a woman dressing herself. Kawakubo was quoted saying
“Many designers cultivate the idea of what they think men want women to be”
For her, clothing was a means of creative expression, not as a method of self-improvement for the gratification of others or of men. Kawakubo’s designs weren’t about opulence or sexuality, in her first store, there were no mirrors because Kawakubo believed clothing should be purchased based on how it makes you feel.
Designers like Yves Saint Laurent presented women in luxurious gowns or highly embellished clothing (Fig. 2), Thierry Mugler’s silhouettes were exaggerated and at times hyper sexualised, emphasising the female form to the extreme (Fig. 3), Kawakubo countered them with women dressed in clothing that didn’t look luxurious and concealed almost all the secondary sex characteristics of the wearer (Fig. 4). Questioning western ideals of beauty had been ingrained from in Kawakubo from growing up in post-occupation Japan, where western ideals, particularly American, were imposed on society by American military and political occupation. Her fabrics were intentionally faded, unfinished, worn (Fig. 5), or deliberately constructed with the internal seams visible to challenge fashion’s insistence on perfectionism. Kawakubo did not have formal fashion training which is partially what led her to use experimental construction techniques.
Japanese Design Concepts
Kawakubo's clothing also commented on poverty, which was a strong theme in her early work, likely influenced by growing up in a country financially crippled by the second world war. The respect of humble materials, irregularity and imperfection is a Japanese concept known as ‘wabi-sabi’ and was in direct ideological opposition to the attitudes in high fashion, where clothing had to represent the height of luxury.
Her designs had strong themes of individualism, in her 1981 show, sweaters had two sets of sleeves or multiple holes, any of which could be the armhole, it was up to each person to choose how they wanted to wear the clothing. This was a continuation of rejecting vanity and prioritising personal expression and creativity. Kawakubo also took inspiration from the kimono, the concept of space around the body 'ma', and that clothing could be its own form, hence the volume and sculptural elements in her garments. This differs from western design which insisted that the body was responsible for creating form, and clothing should follow its physical limitations, not exist separately.
An important part of Kawakubo’s early collections was her collaboration with fellow Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. Kawakubo’s first Paris collection was joint with Yamamoto, together they critiqued high fashion with closely aligned design ethos, hatred for consumption and intense disregard for commercialism.
The Institution vs Rei Kawakubo
In 1981, Comme des Garçons debuted in Paris to shock, Kawakubo’s garments were starkly different from what western audiences and critics had become accustomed to, the palette was primarily dark with lots of black, silhouettes were oversized (Fig.6), concealing rather than conforming to the shapes and form of the body. At the time, there was resistance, critics believed the work was needlessly provocative and the use of faded and torn fabrics an insult to the image of high fashion. It was contemptuously dubbed ‘Hiroshima Chic’, and to diffuse Kawakubo’s impact on the industry she was labelled as an extension of Japanisme, the term for the obsession with stereotypical eastern art in western culture. This term meant journalists and critics didn’t need to acknowledge Kawakubo’s work or that of fellow Japanese designers as more than a passing trend in western culture, which created a distinct divide between what was deemed high fashion and the world of Japanese design.
Kawakubo’s impact did preserve outside the imposed realm of Japanese design because of her innovation and cultural anonymity, her work was rooted in relevant, compelling, and widely accessible ideas in a world moving toward higher social awareness. Paris was the fashion capital of the world and synonymous with elegance, refinement and taste, Kawakubo upset the status quo with clothes that challenged the institute, Kawakubo’s goal was to create something entirely new that had never been done before
“I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”
A Lasting Influence
Kawakubo’s work continues to be ahead of its time in its deconstruction of gender expectations and the presentation of women, it has influenced many designers working today. When Marc Jacobs was the head of Louis Vuitton, he collaborated with Kawakubo on a collection, when asked about her he said,
“it is impossible to overstate Rei Kawakubo's influence on modern fashion,”
Marc Jacobs, New York Times, 2009.
Other designers like Miuccia Prada were inspired by the idea of defiant unconventional beauty, an idea she applied to her own collections. Alexander McQueen idolised Kawakubo and shared her affinity for destruction within clothing and dark colour palettes, McQueen’s personal wardrobe even consisted of mostly Comme Des Garcons. He walked in her 1996 show (Fig.7)
Kawakubo’s innovation led to commercial success, in 1982 she had a boutique in Paris and would open a store in the U.S in 1983. As of 2022, Comme Des Garçons’ has had an average revenue of 220 million dollars per year. She was the theme for the 2017 Met Gala, the only living designer to be honoured since Yves saint Laurent in 1983. Over the past ten years there has been an amplification of gender rights issues, and consumers are opting out of binary structures now more than ever, exposing a new demand for gender neutral clothing. The message is reminiscent of Kawakubo’s egalitarian viewpoint that clothing or art is transcendent of gender or vanity and is simply about individual expression.
Rei Kawakubo was an individualist, who through her upbringing in post war Japan, developed a strong sense of rebellion that drove her to create clothing and art that fiercely contradicted the world of high fashion. She juxtaposed the western standards of luxury, femininity, and sexuality with clothing that was deliberately haggard and concealing, as a method of redefining what fashion could mean for the individual. Despite initial scepticism from the fashion world, she went on to be one of the most notable designers in the industry, inspiring her peers and the generation of designers after her. Despite creating clothes without commercialism in mind, Comme Des Garcons became an incredibly profitable business and brand. Kawakubo’s work was intrinsically Japanese, but she avoided being pigeonholed by the western industry with her undeniable innovation, her new vision of femininity and her unwillingness compromise her artistic vision.
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List of Images:
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