Comme des Garçons (Q4404)
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Japanese fashion brand
- Comme des Garcons
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Comme des Garçons |
Japanese fashion brand |
|
Statements
pattern cutter
graphic designer
2004
pattern-maker
2011
employee
male accessories designer
“What I create is nothing but an expression of my own issues, of what’s inside my head. It’s all about my own values. Of course, I understand those who don’t agree. I accept them. That is freedom.” So says Rei Kawakubo in an interview that’s part of next month’sVogueJapancover story. That article also features an excellent editorial shoot dedicated to last season’s collection, which Kawakubo said was motivated by anger. Today’s, as paraphrased by her husband, Adrian Joffe, in the backstage receiving line, was more redemptive: “With the state of the world as it is, the future as uncertain as it is, if you put air and transparency into the mix of things, there could be the possibility of hope.”The show opened with a triptych of looks that were all white and all rigid. They looked to be in a resin-coated fabric or even something akin to fiberglass. Along with that rigidity, the almost Doric ridges of these structures’ surfaces, plus the deliberate slowness with which their valiant models were obliged to walk, lent them a monumental gravitas. They turned out also to be sculptural toiles of looks to come. These later equivalents were clad in fabrics, silk jacquards to the eye, whose patterning could have stemmed from multiple transnational traditions across Asia and Africa. The stiff ridges of before had transformed into strongly upholstered quilting, soft this time. These supersize structures featured oversized sleeves or sometimes unused armholes.Around them were shown looks that swaddled the models with metal mesh structures filled with material that sometimes resembled insulation down, or were other times encased in a further layer of photo-print fabric. Just glimpse-able as one dress passed was a collage of what looked like protest placards: “Protect our…” I read, before the model moved the message out of sight.Further looks swathed the models in a supersize cone of white filament clad in gold-flecked gauze and garlanded with scarlet tulle. There was a white bow-shaped structure shrouded in white fishnet that was waisted by another scarlet bow. There were more package dresses, composed of multiple conjoined sections of bagged material, sometimes patterned in an abstracted scarlet on white relief. At the end came a final triptych of wearable architecture: three mega-dresses fashioned from what resembled rolled cylinders or scrunched lumps of wrapping plastic.
In thatVogueJapan interview, Kawakubo said, “I only create things that I think are new and that I myself am stimulated by.” Today she delivered another dose of powerful unfamiliarity for us to interrogate and savor.
28 September 2024
Rei Kawakubo issued the starkest press statement that I have read from her—or any other designer. Her collection was simply titled Anger. “This is about my present state of mind. I have anger against everything in the world, especially against myself.”You can absolutely see, and agree with, the first part—how Kawakubo is feeling about the intractable terribleness of what is happening in the world—and applaud her for saying it. Of course, her entire collection was black—although Kawakubo has practically owned black since the 1980s. What hit as far more shocking was to see one of the undisputed greatest in fashion, the woman revered and looked up to by generations, declaring she’s even more angry with herself than with the state of the world.Perhaps it’s her frustration with being unable to prevent evil as an individual citizen. The rage of powerlessness. And on top of that, there’s her remorseless self-criticism for saying this as a fashion designer. She’s someone who has agitated for freedom of expression for a cool 55 years (she set up Comme des Garçons in 1969), and yet here she is: Still implicated in a nonprogressive industry and its set rituals.Such as, putting on a fashion show.For the first time that I can remember, Kawakubo broke her own house rule concerning the impassive deportment of her female models. She instructed some of them to go out and vent, to rip the fabric of the fourth wall that divides the models from audience and photographers. When the third model, dressed in black polyurethane exploded-flare pants and a biker-jacket cape, suddenly did a massive clenched-fist stamp of frustration in the middle of the runway, everyone laughed. We got it.Later, a model turned and loomed over some people in the front row, confrontationally invading their space with a bow-front pannier skirt. Two more stomped halfway up the runway, looked at the photographers, and turned around again, as if to say, “Oh, can I be bothered with this?”If that’s a proper reading—the state of mind of a woman in revolt against the systems she’s caught in—the symbolism embedded in the clothes complicated it further. One look was made of two soft zippered boxes, printed with barbed wire. Another was stamped with chains. The constructs of extreme historical tropes of femininity—the pileups of rosettes, panniers, bows, and pompadour wigs seemed (if you’d read Kawakubo’s show message) to be on the brink of sarcastic self-parody.
Kawakubo is not alone in pointing to the darkness and grotesquerie of the times we are trapped in. She is, however, the only designer who has expressed it so scathingly from a woman’s point of view. We felt her anger and honesty. After all these years, though she may not believe it herself, her courage in confronting the unsayable is exactly what fills us with admiration and gratitude.
3 March 2024
“To break free of the gloomy present, I hope to present a bright and light future.” Much like Rick Owens, who’s also been overcome by a feeling of doom resistance, Rei Kawakubo’s counterintuitive response to the state of the world in 2023 was to roll out 18 huge balls of fun.Playfulness and a sense of humor? These aren’t qualities that are often attributed to Kawakubo—or if they are, one’s always on guard for the catch. Visually, there didn’t seem to be one hidden among the bulky multicolored, bubbly fabric sculptures she sent out. There were neon graphics, tartan, Hawaiian hibiscus prints, and boots and trainers smothered with glittery stick-on gemstones. On the heads: plastic bob wigs in highlighter colors as if a child had drawn them. Or perhaps as a salute to Kawakubo’s great compatriot sister artist, Yayoi Kusama.Non-seriousness, silliness even, might represent a radical stoic stance of sorts. The wordsbreak freein Kawkubo’s one-line press statement are surely a key. Freedom is her watchword—which includes countering what society imposes and “normal” public opinion, as well as any fixed expectation about the solemnity of her work or thoughts. It also stands for the creative freedom that comes from her independence, more precious to her than anything else, and so increasingly rare in times when the fashion industry seems bent on culling creativity everywhere.
30 September 2023
“More…happy?” offered an illustrious colleague backstage immediately after this Comme des Garçons show. His thesis was understandable: Some of the 11 chapters in this presentation seemed positively energized by color and form. But Rei Kawakubo wasted few words in disambiguating: “Not happy!” She added (via translation from her husband, Adrian Joffe): “I wanted to return to the source. Nothing…I wanted to use fabrics that existed without thinking about making proper patterns, just basic patterns, free.” Joffe continued: “She thinks it is really good for the world if we go back to our original source and start again. To try not to fuck it up again. Basically that’s the feeling.”“Why was it important for you to do that?” Kawakubo was asked. After some dialogue considering her question, Joffe transmitted: “She thinks by going back to the beginning she might find something new.”And is it possible to go back to the beginning? “Yes,” replied the designer, flatly. “It’s the only thing to do.” At this point, a colleague sought clarification. “In terms of the beginning, was it the way you worked originally?” “No,” Joffe replied, without consultation. “It’s the beginning of the world. Not her beginning.”“The Big Bang?” (This was me.) “Exactly.” (Gratifying, at the end.)This Comme des Garçons show was split into the aforementioned 11 sections, all group mise-en-scènes soundtracked by different pieces of music curated by Dover Street Market’s Calx Vive. The floor of the American Cathedral was stuck with different colored threads—like orbits in a solar system—which each group of musically accompanied models slowly, and sometimes less so, followed. Here is the rundown.Group 1. Music: “Love in a Void” by Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Too many critics, too few writing,” sang Siouxsie. Steady love: These opening looks were boxy, elemental tailoring—exploded—with intensely wrought Pierrot hats over florally garlanded but lumpy gowns. Takeoff.Group 2. Music: “Friendly Galaxy No. 2” by Sun Ra & His Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. Following the blue thread, circuitously, these looks were charcoal patches of wool resting upon frothing white tulle. Elemental.Group 3. Music: “A New Theory of Eclipse” by Laura Cannell. Joy. Explosion. The Big Bang. Bow-edged silks, deep, topped by twisted pipe-cleaner hats. A beginning of sentience from the sludge of the lack of it.
4 March 2023
“A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today/ And a feeling of wanting to stand together.” So disclosed the press notes for the return of Comme des Garçons to Paris this evening. That’s not to say that this was a sorrowful event: Simone Rocha, Rick Owens, Michèle Lamy, Francesco Risso, and Molly Goddard were all scattered among the serried sitters, standees, and snappers in a room that buzzed with tangible and happy anticipation before the first look came out. Rei Kawakubo was back.And trust Kawakubo to lean against the prevailing winds, then transport us further and in fewer looks because of it. Last season, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fashionland scrambled to be somber, doffing the cap. This season, as that invasion and many other frightening geopolitical scenarios rumble on—just more in the background—normal escapist service has been resumed. But this was anti-fashion. Kawakubo invited us to take a beat, let our smiles slip, and look inward to the apparently inescapable in order to thwart it together.Kawakubo’s process is personal and private: The design and its agenda is her business. What’s our business is how we choose to interpret it. Here there were perhaps a few readable clues in a collection whose looks were abstractedly sculptural. The models were their podiums. Was look 4 a worn egg cup or a woman inverted? I’d say the latter. Was look 16 a flowery doughnut or an ironically framed metaphysical void? Very possibly the former. But you might say something else entirely about these worn impressions. The only thing we’d all agree upon is that this was not conventional clothing.The level of fabric research was intense and heightened; slickly sheeny lacquered lace and sugary-sweet, color-heaped floral jacquards. On some looks you could see the fossilized traces of “normal” pieces—a biker here, a gown there—but all were distended and distorted and blown up or reduced via twists and aggregations of imagination. This was not regular sizing either, Salomon-collab sneakers apart. The pieces were dark embraces.Some of the models wore headpieces in folded card flowers or apparently hodgepodge steampunk-ish assemblages, half-helmet, half-crown. Created under a briefing by Gary Card and Valériane Venance, these looked to resemble virgin crants, the maiden’s garlands in which young, prematurely deceased women were buried in pre-Reformation England. They were chilling.
In look 12 that sinister aspect washed against the buoying impression of the cloth-clad shapes below that appeared to urge the wearer up again.On a possibly boring personal note, watching and then reviewing this collection today has made me flash back to my earliest seasons, eons ago, when I used to feel like a nervous fraud at every show I attended. In the absence of Sarah Mower for a season (she’s at a happy family event), I was handed a shot at Comme, and it revived that gnawing question that nagged me back then: What givesmethe right to have an opinion aboutthis? I was gripped by the same impostor syndrome that Edward Enninful (of all nonimpostors) describes so surprisingly and finely in his autobiography. And I guess the answer is, if you don’t feel like an impostor sometimes, then you probably shouldn’t be here at all.
1 October 2022
“For me, the dark beauty of the black rose symbolizes courage, resistance, and freedom.” Rei Kawakubo touched a nerve with the few words she sent with the photos and video of her Comme des Garçons show from Tokyo. There was no mention of war in Ukraine. As conceptual, non-narrative, and allusive as she is, you never expect to see or hear her directly referencing current affairs. Yet Kawakubo was born in Japan in 1942 in the middle of World War II. Whether it’s been to do with that, with being a woman and an entrepreneur, she has never said, but one thing’s for sure: she holds independence sacred.The black rose in Irish culture is a symbol of resistance against British rule. It might be a bit hard to discern it in the Comme lineup—it only comes in, patterned on a sort of Victoriana brocade at the 12th of the 16 exits. It’s certain that anti-British imperialism in Ireland is what Kawakubo meant, though, because the haunting music—“a beautiful resistance song from Ireland, Roisin Dubh, the little black rose,” was recorded for the show by the Northern Irish slow flautist Ciaran Carlin.Possibly that’s the most political reference Kawkubo’s made in her work—it has no equivalence to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, except for the common factor of dangerously contested borders. But anyway: how to put words to her clothes? Was a sense of dark history, something primal, or even medieval going on?It seemed so to begin with anyway, what with Kawkubo’s use of thick, wadded, speckled-gray felt carpet underlay (or something similar) and headpieces created by Gary Card bulging with assortments of rough, rolled up fabrics. Other hand-crocheted floppy woollen hats had the air of bonnets, country-cottage style. Then somehow, it seemed that upholstery and furnishings were getting involved—lop-sided panniers which perhaps might have been hacked off a sofa; funny cones lined with... was it wallpaper?Hard to say, on a screen. Comme des Garçons hasn’t been showing outside Tokyo for two years. The inimitable ritual of being in the presence of her clothes in all their 3-D-ness has been missed in Paris. How great it would’ve been to get a naked-eye inspection of what was going on within the multi-lapeled depths of Kawakubo’s long tuxedo coat. Perhaps it was a lyrical embodiment of the Black Rose herself, but also an extraordinary, dignified piece of fashion.
9 March 2022
Rei Kawakubo sent a surprisingly personal note by email from Tokyo. Essentially it was a pithy list-to-self about getting rid of the mental snares and conventions of fashion that block her from doing something new:THEME: MY PRESENT STATE OF MIND RATHER THAN A THEME*Things I feel we don’t need these days:The making of intricate fabricThe use of complicated colorsPatterns which clearly define the bodyDetails which emphasize the clothesThe intention to make clothesWhat remains after getting rid of these things is the strongest thingLike simple pebbles that you get after rough rocks have been washed over and swept down the riverWow! If that sounded a lot like Kawakubo was heading toward something like calm, stripped-back minimalism, then one look at the video and look book of the Comme des Garçons show in Tokyo proved the futility of second-guessing anything she might be thinking.She went instead toward giant portable sculptures that were imprinted with flowers, leaves and bows. There were huge shapes, which meant models had to squeeze or shuffle sideways to emerge through a door onto a set. It didn’t feel like one of Kawakubo’s dystopian, apocalyptic moments in which she has seemed to sound a warning about bad things coming. Was her popping-out scenario closer to suggesting a feeling of rebirth, re-emergence, maybe?If so, it’s into a world where—as other fashion designers have been saying—nothing makes sense. Randomness, surrealism and absurdity are registering as part of the mood of 2021. Kawakubo, in confronting her “present state of mind” went large, very, very large, occupying space in ways that no women is meant to (though to be honest, vast art-fashion structures have been her safe space for experimenting for years).She certainly met her own criterion of avoiding making clothes. Comme “dresses” were presented as abstract perambulating 3-D fabric structures, topped off with pastiches of plastic cartoon girly wigs by Gary Card.Some of them had a sort of curved prow; several had net-filled cones spurting from their backs; some were ovoid, another was a 3-D black trashbag flower. Eventually there was an impression of the weight of furnishing fabric and swishing curtain swags. In the end there was a piece that seemed to have entirely merged a woman with a comfy black and white upholstered armchair.Creative minds don’t think alike.
Each to their own brains and oeuvres—but the states of emergency during COVID times have impacted creative people’s psyches, and now their responses are coming out. Paris Fashion Week missed having the Comme de Garçons show to contemplate at a time when fashion needs fearless innovators to take it forward. Kawakubo sets an example for all: a designer who has been independent for a lifetime and is still pushing. Still, you win some, you lose some, a lesson we’ve all had to learn in COVID: The upside of Kawakubo’s isolation from Paris is that she’s actually opened up and used her voice to explain more of how she’s thinking. And that’s a first.
4 October 2021
“Fashion illusion” was Rei Kawakubo's typically brief summation of her latest collection for men, but that was, in fact, exactly what we saw. There is something dialectical about the way Rei works. She offers a thesis one season, presents its antithesis the next, then finally synthesizes both approaches. Such was the case for Fall, which was a—dare I use the distinctly un-Comme word?—gorgeous summation of some ideas she's been toying with for a while.Kawakubo's longtime hatter Stephen Jones accessorized the clothes with memorable pieces of headgear from his own archives, which seemed to underscore the fact that we were being offered an overview of some kind. The models had the limpid eyes and marcel-waved hair of silent movie starlets. On their feet were leopard slip-ons with jeweled buckles, or two-tone patent Mary Janes with big bows. And, by way of unholy contrast, they were wearing classic tailored suits in gray flannel, pinstripe, and bird's-eye. Rei used her illusion by inserting contradictory panels of fabric into these cloths of convention: a leopard spot next to twill, a rough check in a Prince of Wales jacket, an oblique camo with bird's-eye, or a print of a Napoleonic tailcoat hard up against gray pinstripe.The clash of restraint and release was so irresistible, it whisked us over a more conventionally confrontational group of boiled-wool jackets and black skirts that seemed positively barbaric in comparison to what had come before. Order was restored with a three-piece suit whose waistcoat was printed on the shirt underneath. Like I said, totally dialectical.\This review was originally published onmen.style.comon January 23, 2009. It has been added to Vogue Runway in June 2021 as a part ofThe Lost Season.
11 June 2021
“I needed to take one breath in the monochrome serenity.” In the Comme des Garçons look book sent from Tokyo, Rei Kawakubo’s 20 models looked as if they might be ascending on clouds, borne up on big, romantic, Victoriana black and white shapes. Except for the ever so slightly disturbing shadows falling behind each woman on the backdrop, the effect might almost have been ethereal.From such small clues must we try to decipher the mood of the legendary creator. The first line of her press release spoke of her impulse to block out the “inundation of information”—something we’re surely all relating to as a mental health tactic at the moment. But it’s telling to see what remained—or arose—when Kawakubo assigned herself the task of embodying “serenity” in her collection. For one thing: “monochrome” was always the original Comme des Garçons factory setting. In the early ’80s, right at the start of her showing in Paris, Kawakubo’s uncompromising use of black was deemed shocking and “conceptual” (probably this was where that tag became attached to nonconformist fashion in the first place). Her radical rejection of Eurocentric standards of design was so influential that it caused a generation of alternative-minded women to clad themselves only in black for a decade and a half, and often for life.But this collection, in its intention to separate itself from the worldly cares of 2021, isn’t a minimalist stripping-away of the signs and symbols of fashion at all. There’s something sumptuously Edwardian-Victorian about all these black cloaks with puffy white linings, ballooning crinolines, frothy layers of whipped white cotton and black tulle. With the addition of the rakish stovepipe hats from Ibrahim Kamara, it could almost—almost—come across as a modernist echo of Cecil Beaton’sMy Fair LadyAscot scene.Comme de Garçons’s “monchrome serenity” comes from an escapist place. Is it a tender, playful, and nostalgic place too? The longer you look, the more beautiful things are revealed: tufted coats and classically tailored jackets amongst the puffballs and drum-like skirts. It’s nice to imagine that Kawakubo might have been having fun being absorbed in all of this. For creative people, making and imagining is a safe space. Whatever it was that was flowing through her mind at the time, it looked like a resistance against melancholy, even with those shadows at her back.
23 March 2021
From Tokyo, where all the Comme des Garçons family of designers have been showing, an email suggested that Rei Kawakubo has been striving to arrive at a creative resolution for designing in the midst of the existential plight that we’re all suffering. Dissonance was her theme, explained thus: “The human brain always looks for harmony and logic. When logic is denied, when there is dissonance a powerful moment is created which leads you to feel an inner turmoil and tension that can lead to finding positive change and progress.”Any note of hope is gratefully received in these times of chaos. Discerned through the red light of her set—surely a signifier of the hellish state of the world—her prescription for survival seemed threaded through with a playful, ironic sense of humor. Voluminous shapes, crinolines, bubbles, cloaks, and trapezoid coats—quite ideal for social distancing—came covered in plastic film. Stare at them awhile, and you might start thinking of Cecil Beaton’s cellophane concoctions for the bright young things of the 1920s, transposed into our 2020 age of PPE.Then, what was Kawakubo up to, playing with Mickey Mouse and the Japanese Bearbrick teddy bear toy? Cutely reassuring representations of childhood innocence to cling to in our times of trouble, perhaps. Or maybe we can read them as rather more satirical political ciphers? The thing about Kawakubo is that her work brilliantly captures so many dissonant ideas at the same time. A phrase in her notes said she was interested in disrupting “the spirit of couture” with “illogical combinations and juxtapositions.” You sense she likes both the romance and glitter of couture and the messing with it, though—and this time, it almost felt like she’d had fun with it.
19 October 2020