Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons: Against Clothing

Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969 and showed in Paris in 1981. The idea she has pursued is that clothes should be questioned rather than made beautiful. This page records the fixed points of that idea. It is not a complete history. It is a reading of the method that still explains why a Comme des Garçons piece is never only decoration. Everything below is drawn from interviews, museum accounts and the pages already published in this house.

This page sits with Against Clothing: Rei Kawakubo and the Japanese Avant-Garde, Junya Watanabe: Technical Radicalism, A Collector’s Atlas of Tokyo Boutiques, and The Japonista Thesis.

The designer generation that treated the garment as a proposition rather than decoration.

The case against clothing

Kawakubo showed in Paris in April 1981 with black, asymmetric, apparently unfinished clothes. The response was described as a storm of controversy; some used the phrase Hiroshima chic, which she rejected. The 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body used polyurethane padding to distort the body. Later work has included the claim of not making clothes. The Metropolitan Museum devoted its 2017 Costume Institute exhibition to her work. She has consistently refused to explain the pieces, expecting the clothing itself to be read. The institutional select shops edit permanent offers. Comme des Garçons has practised a long-running version of questioning the garment. Collectors who buy pieces from any period are buying the continuation of that practice. The longer reading is in the Against Clothing page already linked; the technical side of the house is recorded in the Watanabe page.

The rooms

Dover Street Market and the other institutional rooms continue the practice of editing permanent offers that do not explain themselves. The Atlas records the rooms; the collections hold the pieces that still move through them. After a particular early or institutional piece, the Hunting Salon searches across private collector circles.

Further reading

• Issey Miyake: Pleats and the Continuity of Form, for the pleating method behind Pleats Please
• The Antwerp Six and the Parallel Deconstruction, for the Belgian generation of 1986 and its parallel to Tokyo
• Yohji Yamamoto: The Archive of Imperfection, for black, asymmetry and the beauty of the unfinished
• Martin Margiela: Deconstruction and the Exposed Seam, for the seam turned outward as a statement
• After Kawakubo, for the new Japanese avant-garde and the houses shaping it
• agnès b. watches: sam, marcello and the Cinema watch, for a Paris label's watches made by Seiko from 1989
• Junya Watanabe, for the pattern cutter who has shown under his own name inside Comme des Garçons since 1992