Rei Kawakubo is a Japanese born designer whose unconventional approach to fashion has had undoubted impact on Western dress by challenging the established fashion norms with the understated elegance of her avant-garde deconstructivist sensibilities. She has become one of the most influential designers of the past four decades, with nearly every major fashion designer citing her as inspiration. With no formal design training, Kawakubo began designing clothes in 1967, and established Comme des Garçons in 1969, an empire that now houses over twenty subsidiary lines. By the early 1980’s, Kawakubo and her contemporary, Yohji Yamamoto, were showing collections in Paris, a time period often referred to as “the Japanese Invasion.” Her collections shocked the international fashion industry, says Kawakubo, “I never intended to start a revolution, [my intention was to show] what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.” With an affinity for black and white, she most often worked monochromatically in her early years. Described as “post-atomic anti-fashion,” her designs were severely minimal and asymmetrical, characterized by torn and ragged fabric, uneven and unstitched hemlines, and oversized layers. By the end of the 1990’s she was embracing colour as she continued to leave the standard fashion rules crumbling in her wake. Misplaced lapels and buttons on a large cut coat with no distinguishable silhouette, paired with seemingly mismatched fabrics and a calculated disarray of knots, ties and slashes continue to be the norm. “The more people that are afraid when they see new creation, the happier I am,” says Kawakubo. Her presentations repeatedly follow the Japanese sensibility of finding beauty in imperfection and harmony in disorder, a theme that runs consistently throughout Japanese art, whether it be in fine art, architecture, or fashion. Forty years later, Kawakubo remains at the forefront of fashion, still doing her own thing with the same unbending ideals and methods. Constantly seeking newness and that which has not yet been created, Kawakubo admits that “as the weight of experience piles up, it has become increasingly difficult to find yet new ways of thinking and to make new things,” yet she manages to persist with her intellectual approach to fashion, continually challenging the accepted standards of beauty.
1942 On October 11, Rei Kawakubo is born in Tokyo, Japan.
1960 Studies fine arts and literature at Keio University. While at university she becomes good friends with Yohji Yamamoto--a kindred spirit--and the two remain good friends to this day. So alike in their design, aesthetics, and philosophy that twenty-seven years later Newsweek will refer to the duo as “the Monk and the Nun.�
1964
Both Kawakubo and Yamamoto create clothing with a high artistic value, culture and complexities.
Graduates from Keio University and begins work in the advertising department of Tokyo textile firm, Asahi Kasai.
1967 Begins career as a freelance stylist at the encouragement of a friend and begins designing clothes. Says Kawakubo, “It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t find the kinds of clothes I wanted. I was frustrated by the way we chose the clothes.”
1969 Comme des Garçons is established. Derived from Françoise Hardy lyrics, the name means “like some boys.” As Vogue notes, “[It was] chosen for it’s euphony, but it proved ironically apt for designs that challenged the conventional feminine ideal.” Kawakubo maintains sole control of the company to this day.
1973 Comme des Garçons becomes a limited company, formed to produce clothes for specific Japanese women’s boutiques.
1975 Kawakubo opens first boutique in Tokyo, catering to a woman “who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.”
1978 Menswear line called “Homme” is introduced, the company now has over twenty additional lines.
Comme des Garçons now houses many subsidiary menswear lines including Comme des Garçons Homme, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, and Comme des Garçons Homme Deux among others.
1981 Part of the early 1980’s “Japanese Invasion,” Kawakubo first shows in Paris. Her work was originally labelled “Holocaust chic” and described as looking suitable of a bag-lady. One critic went so far as to suggest the label change it’s name to “Comme des Clochards” (Like some Tramps). “Their presentations were so powerful and their clothes so radical that some feared they would change the face of fashion irrevocably,” said Bernadine Morris, The New York Times fashion, of Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, while another critic declared their androgynous abstractions signalled “the end of fashion.”
Examples of early Comme des Garçons, critics often referred to it as “Hiroshima chic.”
1982 First Paris boutique in Paris opens.
1983 Receives her first Mainichi Newspaper Fashion award and is featured in the Phoenix Art Museum’s presentation of “A New Wave in Fashion: Three Japanese Designers.” Opens boutique in SoHo, New York. Creates costumes for Molissa Fenley’s Hemispheres.
1984 Junya Watanabe joins Comme des Garçons as a pattern maker and assistant.
1985
1986
Comme des Garçons, Vogue Italia, February 1985, photo by Steven Miesel.
Receives a Fashion Group International award.
1987 Honoured by New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in an exhibition devoted to three women who have changed the direction of fashion. The exhibition is titled, “Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo.” “Noir” and “Homme Deux” lines debut.
1988 The company’s publishes the first issue of Six (as in sixth sense), a quarto-sized biannual magazine. The magazine featured very little text, mainly consisting of photographs and images that Kawakubo found inspiring (it ceases publication in 1991). Earns second Mainichi Newspaper Fashion award. Comme des Garçons Shirt line introduced.
1989 Opens flagship store in Tokyo.
1992 Marries Adrian Joffe, wearing a black skirt and plain white shirt, in Paris’s City Hall. Gives Junya Watanabe his own label, “Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons,” which now also includes Tao Kurihara and Fumito Ganryu.
Grace Coddington in Comme des Garçons, Vogue Italia, October 1992.
Junya Watanabe was given his own label in 1992 after 8 years of working with Kawakubo. The above photo is from his ready-to-wear collection for F/W 2013.
1993 “Essence of Quality,” an exhibition featuring her work, opens at the Kyoto Costume Institute. Honored as a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an Order of France that recognizes significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields.
1994 Launch of “Comme des Garçons Comme Des Garçons,” a secondary womenswear line.
1995 The striped pajamas and close-cropped hair on the models at the men’s show spark controversy when Jewish groups cite a resemblance to concentration camp uniforms. Coincidentally the show coincides with the liberation of Auschwitz. Kawakubo is devastated and takes the pajamas off the market. “Rei is devastated, it was never her intention to make any reference to the Holocaust. Her theme was of turn-of-the-century England, when gentlemen came home in the evening and put on their dressing gowns and pajamas.” --Adrian Joffe to WWD, husband and chairman of Comme Des Garçons
1996 The infamous “Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress” collection for S/S 1997 is unveiled, featuring bulbous stuffed swellings which critics referred to as “tumors” or labelled it the “Lumps and Bumps” or the “Quasimodo” collection. It shocked an audience that, one would assume by now, might be unshockable.
From choreographer Merce Cunningham’s “Scenario,” costumes and set designed by Kawakubo and inspired by her S/S 1997 collection, Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress.
1997
From what some referred to as the “Lumps and Bumps” collection for S/S 1997.
Receives an honorary doctorate from Britain’s Royal College of Art. Kawakubo’s first theatrical endeavour with Merce Cunningham called “Scenario,” she designs the set and costumes based on the “Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress” collection.
1998 Launches a unisex fragrance, Odeur 53, and caught the attention of the media when it was introduced as an “anti-perfume” that combined 53 notes, including nail polish and burned rubber.
2000 Receives Harvard Graduate School of Design Excellence in Design award.
2001 In conjunction with “2 Women: Gabrielle Chanel and Rei Kawakubo,” curated by Walter Van Beirendonck, Kawakubo stages and films five presentations of the fall 2001 collection in different locations in Antwerp.
Comme des Garçons in the September issue of Vogue Italia, 2001.
2004
Inside snapshot of the Dover Street Market at 17-18 Dover Street in London, England.
Begins launching her guerilla pop-up stores, which are open for a year only to be dismantled. Twenty of these pop-up in unlikely locations and ultimately the company opens Dover Street Market in London, a conceptual retail space that houses a variety of great fashion brands along with the full range of Comme des Garçons lines. “I want to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos: the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision. We hope to make DSM more and more interesting. I enjoy seeing all the customers coming to DSM dressed in their strong, good looking and individual way. I would like for DSM to be the place where fashion becomes fascinating.” --Rei Kawakubo
2005 The debut of Tao Comme des Garçons, designed by Tao Kurihara. (She later ceases the label in Spring 2011 to focus her creative energies on Tricot Comme des Garçons). The New Yorker profiles Kawakubo.
2006 Exhibition of Comme des Garçons’ advertising and graphic design held in Tokyo. “When I began, I was fighting the resistance to change and fear of new things,” Kawakubo told Vogue. “It was more about a personal struggle. But through the years it’s become more, bigger, wider. Now the fight is against the outside system.”
Comme des Garçons’ unique advertising reinforces their status as an avant-garde label.
2007 The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco features Comme des Garçons in their show, “Stylized Sculpture.”
2008 The company designs six limited-edition bags and a temporary store for Louis Vuitton, as well as a guest collection for H&M. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit presents “ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo.” Swimsuits designed for the US Olympic swim team to wear in Beijing are designed by Comme des Garçons in collaboration with Speedo.
2009 Introduction of Black line in response to the recession. Under the Ground store opens in Hong Kong.
2010 Comme des Garçons teams up with Paco Rabanne to reintroduce a bag from 1969.
2011 Opening of a new store in Beijing called the I.T Beijing Market, with a similar concept to the Dover Street Market.
2012
The exterior of the I.T Beijing Market by Comme des Garçons.
Honoured with the CFDA International award. "Winning a CFDA Fashion Award is the highest and one of the most coveted honors one can receive in our industry.” --Steven Kolb, CEO of Council of Fashion Designers of America Collaboration with Hermès which includes two collections: “Noir et Blanc,” an all black and white collection, and “Couleur,” a full colour collection.
From the “Noir et Blanc” collection of the Hermès and Comme des Garçons collaboration.
From the “Couleur” collection of the Hermès and Comme des Garçons collaboration.
2013 "My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. There is never a mood board, I do not go through fabric swatches, I do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new. As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere. Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never ending. There is never a moment when I think, 'this is working, this is clear.' If for one second I think something is finished, the next thing would be impossible to do." --Rei Kawakubo
Images from Taschen’s 2013 release of “Rei Kawakubo� which delivers a short biography on the life and work of Kawakubo. Edited by Terry Jones, founder and creative director of i-D Magazine.