Rei Kawakubo (born October 11, 1942 in Tokyo) is the legendary Japanese fashion designer and founder of COMME DES GARÇONS, the groundbreaking fashion house she created in 1973. Untrained in the conventional sense of fashion design, Kawakubo studied fine arts and literature at Keio University, and upon graduation she worked in a textile company followed by a work as a freelance stylist in 1967. Two years after launching COMME DES GARÇONS, she opened her first boutique in Tokyo in 1975 with a women’s line, and in 1978 she added a men’s line as well. Three years later, she started presenting her fashion lines in Paris each season, opening up a boutique in Paris in 1982.
COMME DES GARÇONS specialises in anti-fashion, austere, sometimes deconstructed garments. During the 1980s, her garments were primarily in black, dark grey or white, and the materials were often draped around the body and featured frayed, unfinished edges along with holes and a general asymmetrical shape. Challenging the established notions of beauty she created an uproar at her debut Paris fashion show where journalists labeled her clothes ‘Hiroshima chic’ amongst other things. Since the late 1980s her colour palette has grown somewhat. Rei’s creative direction extends far beyond fashion and accessories alone — she is greatly involved in graphic design, advertising and shop interiors believing that all these things are a part of one vision and are inextricably linked. Her Aoyama, Tokyo store, for example, is known for its sloping glass facade decorated with blue dots, and was designed in collaboration between Rei and architect Future Systems and interior designer Takao Kawasaki. Rei published her own bi-annual magazine, Six (standing for ‘sixth sense’), in the early 1990s. It featured very little text and consisted mainly for photographs and images that she deemed inspiring. In 1996 Rei was guest editor of the high art publication Visionaire.
Yesterday, the Council of Fashion Designers of America honored Kawakubo with their 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award in New York. Style.com recently published a tribute to the renowned designer, with insight from such names as Taylor Tomasi Hill, Shane Gabier, and Chris Peters, who each discuss their love for the avant-garde label. Prestigious fashion writer Cathy Horyn also wrote a feature on Kawakubo’s life and work for The New York Times entitled “Like Mona Lisa, Ever So Veiled“: “No living designer, with the exception of Azzedine Alaïa, is held in higher esteem by her peers, and none has enriched our spirit in so many original and confounding ways.” Horyn included a fascinating email from Kawakubo which reads:
“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 was not able to attend the event Monday night, but she asked her close friend, filmmaker John Waters, to accept the award on her behalf. To read more about the extraordinary life and work of this phenomenal fashion talent be sure to visit Style.com and The New York Times. To enter the mother ship simply head over to COMME-DES-GARCONS.com.
