Against Clothing: Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons and the Japanese Avant-Garde

When Rei Kawakubo showed Comme des Garçons in Paris in April 1981, the response was, in the words of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a storm of controversy. The clothes were black, torn, asymmetric and apparently unfinished, and they were presented as if the problem lay with the audience’s idea of clothing, not with the garments. In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum devoted its Costume Institute exhibition to her work, a rare honour for a living designer. The idea that Kawakubo has spent a career pursuing is not that clothes should be beautiful, but that they should be questioned. This essay follows that idea from the first Tokyo show to the archive pieces now held in collections.

A company before a collection

Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo on 11 October 1942. She began the Comme des Garçons label in 1969, founded the company in 1973, held her first Tokyo show in 1975, added menswear in 1978 and set up a Paris subsidiary in 1981. The order matters. She designed the business as carefully as she designed the clothes, and the house has never behaved like a fashion label that happens to sell perfume. It behaves like a studio that happens to make garments, shops, fragrances, magazines and, since 2004, Dover Street Market.

Paris, 1981

The Paris debut came in the same season as Yohji Yamamoto’s; both showed in April 1981 and between them they changed the vocabulary of the runway. Critics reached for names. ‘Hiroshima chic’ is the best known, and it is dated differently by different writers: one ties it to the 1981 debut, Britannica to the 1982 Destroy collection, along with ‘postatomic’ and ‘bag lady’, and the National Gallery of Victoria cites ‘Hiroshima’s revenge’ for autumn/winter 1982. Who coined it is unproven. The labels say more about the audience than about the designer, who has consistently refused to explain her work.

The case against clothing

Her most famous collection is Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, spring/summer 1997, nicknamed ‘lumps and bumps’ for the polyurethane pillows stuffed into dresses to distort the body. The Metropolitan Museum’s 2017 exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, curated by Andrew Bolton and open from 4 May to 4 September, took the in-between as its subject: the space between fashion and art, between body and dress, between self and other. The philosophy is not hostile to clothing so much as it is to the habit of thinking about clothing. A shirt is the right place to start that argument; SHIRT, the Comme des Garçons line, dates from 1988.

The family

• Junya Watanabe joined in 1984, began his own label in 1992 and showed in Paris from 1993. Essay
• Noir Kei Ninomiya began in 2012; the first collection was for spring/summer 2013.
• Tao Kurihara began her own label around 2005.
• PLAY, begun in 2002, carries a heart drawn by Filip Pagowski, who has said he made it for another project that never happened and independently of the line.
• Dover Street Market opened at 17 to 18 Dover Street, Mayfair, on 10 September 2004, in Ginza in 2012 and in New York in December 2013.
• Parfums Comme des Garçons were formed in 1993; the first fragrance followed in 1994.
• H&M brought a collection to stores on 13 November 2008.

Reading the archive

Comme des Garçons pieces are dated by season and by the line name on the label, and the AD year, as in AD2017, is the house’s own calendar. Archive collectors look for the landmark seasons, the first-wave black, and the collaborations in which the house meets a maker with its own tradition. One of the clearest is the horsehide rider made by Lewis Leathers for Comme des Garçons in AD2017, a British pattern in a Japanese argument; see The Rider Jacket. Japanese sizing, condition grades and the way labels change between decades are explained in the Designer Archives guide.

Why Japan

Comme des Garçons has been bought in Tokyo since the 1970s, often by customers who kept every season. The shops, the department store counters and the Dover Street Market floors all fed private wardrobes that are now reaching collectors in good order, with labels, tags and bags.

In the archive now

• Comme des Garçons · Rei Kawakubo · Junya Watanabe · Lewis Leathers · Designer leather jackets

Continue reading

• Yohji Yamamoto: The Discipline of Silence
• Issey Miyake: Clothing as Architecture
• Japanese Fashion as Design Philosophy
• Encyclopedia entry · The Fashionista Bible

Looking for a landmark season or a collaboration? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan’s private collector circles on your behalf.

Index terms: rei kawakubo · comme des garcons history · body meets dress · lumps and bumps · hiroshima chic · dover street market · junya watanabe · noir kei ninomiya · comme des garcons play · comme des garcons lewis leathers · art of the in-between