Rei Kawakubo, (born October 11, 1942, Tokyo, Japan), self-taught Japanese fashion designer known for her avant-garde clothing designs and her high fashion label, Comme des Garçons (CDG), founded in 1969. Kawakubo’s iconoclastic vision made her one of the most influential designers of the late 20th century.
Kawakubo studied fine arts and aesthetics at Keio University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964. She had a strong female role model in her mother, who left Kawakubo’s father when he would not let her work outside the home. Likewise independent, Kawakubo left home after college and took a position in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, an acrylic fibre textilemanufacturer. She was given creative freedom by her superior there and became involved in collecting props and costumes for photo shoots. That activity ultimately led her to design her own fashions when she could not find an appropriate costume for a shoot. In 1967 she became a freelance stylist.
By 1969 Kawakubo was selling her designs under the CDG label to shops in Tokyo. In 1973 she opened her first store, and within a decade she had 150 shops across Japan and was earning $30 million annually. Kawakubo was committed to offering women, comme des garçons (“like boys”), clothes designed for mobility and comfort. For this reason, she never designed stilettos or had her models wear them on the runway. Her clothes were designed for the independent woman who did not dress to seduce or gain a man’s approval. Kawakubo recoiled from Western definitions of sexiness, which focused on revealing and exposing the body. She found revealing clothing decidedly boring.
Rather than respond to trends, Kawakubo rooted her designs in concepts, straddling art and fashion. Thus, her designs, especially early in her career, used tremendous amounts of fabric and often looked voluminous on the wearer’s body. Because they did not fit the industry’s perception of what women wanted, her garments were sometimes described as antifashion. Her influential 1982 collection, Destroy, featured oversized, loosely knit sweaters with holes of varying size that looked as though they had been slashed open. The dark, disheveled style was dubbed by the media the “postatomic look” or “Hiroshima chic” and, sometimes, the “bag lady” look.
Kawakubo’s clothing designs were sometimes so abstract and unconventional that they were virtually unwearable. The collection often cited in that context was Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress (spring/summer 1997), which featured garments with lumps of padding positioned in unflattering places. It became known colloquially as the “lumps and bumps,” “tumor,” or “Quasimodo” collection and was criticized for blatantly disfiguring the female form. That collection inspired Kawakubo’s costume design for choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance piece Scenario(1997).
Kawakubo won the Fashion Group International award (1986) and the Excellence in Design Award from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2000). In 1993 she was honoured by the French government as a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. Her fashions were featured in several exhibitions, including “Mode et Photo, Comme des Garçons” at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1986), “Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo” at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City (1987), “ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit(2008), and “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” (2017) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Sources:
Conceptual Art and Fashion in the 21st Century
wwww.fashionista.com
www.britannica.com
