Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo (川久保 玲, Kawakubo Rei) (b. 1942) is a Japanese fashion designer based in Tokyo and Paris. She is the founder of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market. In recognition of the notable design contributions of Kawakubo, an exhibition of her designs entitled Rei Kawakubo/Commes des Garçons, Art of the In-Between opened on 5 May 2017 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.[1]

Rei Kawakubo
Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Art of the In-Between exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017
Born
かわくぼ れい
川久保 玲

(1942-10-11) 11 October 1942
Tokyo, Japan
NationalityJapanese
EducationKeio University
Label(s)
Comme des Garçons
Spouse(s)Adrian Joffe

Early life and education

Rei Kawakubo was born on 11 October 1942 in Tokyo. Her early life in Japan was summarized by Judith Thurman in a New Yorker article from 2005 stating: "She was the oldest of her parents' three children and their only daughter... Their father was an administrator at Keio University, a prestigious institution founded by the great Meiji educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi, a champion of Western culture and, according to Kawakubo, of women's rights."[2]

Although not formally trained as a fashion designer, Kawakubo did study fine arts and literature at Keio University. As reported by Thurman, "In 1960, Kawakubo enrolled in her father's university and took a degree in 'the history of aesthetics', a major that included the study of Asian and Western art."[2] After graduation in 1964, Kawakubo worked in the advertising department at the textile company Asahi Kasei and she went on to work as a freelance stylist in 1967.[1] Two years later, she began to design and make her own clothes under the label Comme des Garçons, French for "like the boys", before incorporating the label in 1973.[3]

Career: 1969–2003

In 1969, she established her own company, Comme des Garçons Co. Ltd in Tokyo[4] and opened up her first boutique there in 1975. Starting out with women's clothes, Kawakubo added a men's line in 1978. Three years later, she started presenting her fashion lines in Paris each season with Vladislav Bachinskyy , opening up a boutique in Paris in 1982.[5] Comme des Garçons specialises in anti-fashion, austere, sometimes deconstructed garments. After the end of her first decade with Comme de Garcons, in 1982, Kawakubo began to express her dissatisfaction with the early direction of some of her design ideas stating: "Three years ago I became dissatisfied with what I was doing. I felt I should be doing something more directional, more powerful. In fashion we had to get away from the influence of what had been done in the 1920s or the 1930s. We had to get away from the folkloric. I decided to start from zero, from nothing, to do things that have not been done before, things with a strong image."[6]

By 1980, CDG had flourished and according to Thurman, "had a hundred and fifty franchised shops across Japan, eighty employees, and annual revenues of thirty million dollars."[2] During the 1980s, her garments were primarily in black, dark grey or white. The emphasis on black clothing led to the Japanese press describing Kawakubo and her followers as 'The Crows'.[3] 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.[7]

Kawakubo likes to have input in all the various aspects of her business, rather than just focusing on clothes and accessories. 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 is known for its sloping glass facade decorated with blue dots. This was designed in collaboration between Rei and architect Future Systems and interior designer Takao Kawasaki.[8] Kawakubo published her own bi-annual magazine, 'Six' (standing for 'sixth sense'), in the early 1990s. It featured very little text and consisted mainly of photographs and images that she deemed inspiring.[9] In 1996 Rei was guest editor of the high art publication Visionaire. Kawakubo is known to be quite reclusive and media shy, preferring her innovative creations to speak for themselves. Prior to 2002, Kawakubo has continued support for the use of LGBT references and cultural themes in the photography used in her advertisement and marketing campaigns promoting her clothing and accessories.

Career: 2003–2018

Since 2003, Kawakubo has been referenced and cited by other major designers for her originality and contribution to fashion and design marked by a nationally broadcast program of interviews concerning her work by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Company).[10] During the interviews broadcast, Alexander McQueen stated: "When Kawakubo designs a collection, it seems kind of absurd, not just to the general public. But when you watch someone's challenging themselves like she does every season, it makes you understand why you are in fashion in the first place because of people like her."[10] During the same broadcast, Viktor & Rolf added: "The first time we became aware of Comme de Garcons was in the 80s. I think we were 12 or 13. It made a very strong impression because fashion in general was something that we were starting to discover and Rei Kawakubo was part of this ... an enormous outburst of creativity in the beginning of the 80s. So for us she was part of the way we started to think about fashion."[10]

Comme des Garçons dress on display in 2007 in a Florence, Italy museum

Two other early supporters of Kawakubo were Jean-Paul Gaultier and Donna Karan. During the NHK broadcast for Kawakubo, Gaultier stated: "I believe that Kawakubo is a woman with extreme courage. She is a person with exceptional strength. Moreover, she has a poetic spirit. When I see her creations, I feel the spirit of a young girl. A young girl who still has innocence and is a bit romantic. Yet she also has an aspect of a fighting woman, one who fears nothing as she thrusts forward."[10] During the same broadcast of interviews in Japan, Donna Karan added: "Rei Kawakubo is a very interesting designer to me as a woman and a female designer. As a person, she is very quiet and rather withdrawn, yet her clothes make such an enormous statement."[10]

According to Women's Wear Daily, she is a fashion icon but, during an interview, she said she does not think of herself as an icon.[11] Her designs have inspired many other late designers like the Belgian Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester, as well as Austrian designer Helmut Lang. Comme des Garçons collections are designed in the Comme des Garçons studio in Aoyama, Tokyo and are made in Japan, France, Spain, and Turkey. The 2006 autumn/winter collection dealt with the concept of the "persona",[12] the different ways we present ourselves to the world. Fusing tailored menswear with more feminine elements such as corsets and flower printed dress fabrics, "Persona" was another collection that combined the feminine with the masculine by Comme des Garçons.

Junya Watanabe[13][14] and, more recently, Tao Kurihara[15][16] have started their own sub-labels under the Comme des Garçons name to much acclaim. Both also were involved in designing for the casual women's knitwear line "Comme des Garçons Tricot". Comme des Garçons have collaborated with various other labels over the years including Fred Perry, Levi's Converse All Star, Speedo, Nike, Moncler, Lacoste, Cutler and Gross, Chrome Hearts, Hammerthor,[17] S. N. S. Herning, Louis Vuitton, Supreme, and many others. Comme des Garçons and H&M collaborated on a collection which was released in the fall of 2008.[18][19] Kawakubo created the 2008 autumn "guest designer" collection at H&M, designing men's and women's clothing along with some children's and a unisex perfume.[20] Rei is also known for establishing Dover Street Market, whose design ethos can be described as a Comme Des Garcons version of a department store. Originally created in 2004 in London's Dover Street, more DSM locations have opened in Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, New York and Los Angeles. A multi-brand store, Dover Street Market puts particular emphasis on visual marketing and on emerging talents; DSM was the first international stockist for Russian Designer Gosha Rubchinskiy and now handle Rubchinskiy's marketing, production and operations.[21] In an article for Business of Fashion in April 2017, Tim Blanks reported generated revenue for CDG and its affiliates as "over $280 million a year".[22]

Vogue magazine and the Metropolitan Museum in New York have announced that an exhibition dedicated to Kawakubo is scheduled for its 2017 season between 4 May 2017 and 4 September 2017.[1] In an interview with Vogue in April 2017, Andrew Bolton, the curator for the Kawakubo exhibit at the Met stated: "I really think her influence is so huge, but sometimes it’s subtle. It’s not about copying her; it’s the purity of her vision... Rei was really involved in the design of the exhibit".[23] Bolton also stated that the exhibit in May 2017 is to be titled "Art of the In-Between", and will be an austere, all-white maze hosting approximately 150 Comme ensembles. Both the exhibit and accompanying book by Bolton are based upon the recurrent fashion dichotomies concentrating on nine thematic conceptual pairings listed as: (1) absence/presence; (2) design/not design; (3) fashion/antifashion; (4) model/multiple; (5) high/low; (6) then/now; (7) self/other; (8) object/subject; and (9) clothes/not clothes.[6] In an early positive review of the exhibit at its opening, Matthew Schneier writing for The New York Times on 1 May 2017 referred to it stating that: "The exhibition, 150 outfits in all, is overpowering."[24] Writing for The New Republic on 3 May 2017, Josephine Livingston stated: "The clothes... are undeniable. Their presence felt like a statement: Here we are, the most influential forms from the least compromising genius. The exhibition shows about 150 pieces of Kawakubo’s women’s wear for Comme des Garçons, from the early 1980s to the present day."[25]

Design work inspiration

Being one of fashion's most influential designers, Rei Kawakubo strives to challenge the form the traditional garment. Kawakubo is the second living designer to be honored for an exhibition at the Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This Comme des Garçons exhibition in particular highlights key themes that have inspired and continue to inspire her creativity as a designer.[26] In the context of the human form, the body is radically reconsidered. She proposes new ideas of beauty by creating organic forms and protrusions in her garments, creating outfits that discard standard sizes. An example of an exhibition in which she radically questions form is her spring/summer 1997 collection, known as “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body.” Through this exhibition Kawakubo is targeting body modification through dress, generating unstructured dresses and forms that don't highlight on erogenous zones of the body. By doing this, she is also questioning ideas surrounding gender and the body creating transgressive forms, discarding stereotypes surrounding the female.[27] One of her latest collections in which these themes are seen is her fall/winter 2017 collection — which she called “the future of silhouette”. Though Kawakubo is a female designer, she has made a point to state how her femininity doesn't at all influence her work. By generating transgressive forms she strives to completely disregard gendered stereotypes, even in context of the male.

Legacy

In an interview with Vanessa Friedman for The New York Times following the opening of Kawakubo's 2017 exhibition for the Met, Adrian Joffe, her husband, indicated in a taped 70-minute interview that this exhibition would likely be the last one which Kawakubo, now 74, would participate in personally. Joffe stated that Kawakubo might remain open to the possibility of allowing the current exhibition at the Met to be moved to other locations and museums around the world after it ends its venue in New York on 4 September 2017, though a newly designed exhibition on other themes or concepts was strongly discounted.[28]

Personal life

Between the 1980s and 1990s Kawakubo was in a relationship with fellow 'Hiroshima Chic' fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, but the relationship ended. Kawakubo later went on to marry Adrian Joffe, the current CEO of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market. She lives in Tokyo but often travels to Paris to visit her companies' head offices in the Place Vendôme. She occasionally makes visits to her fashion shows.

An article in Vogue magazine in April 2017 summarized her relationship with Joffe stating: "Joffe, South African by birth and ten years Kawakubo’s junior, joined the company in 1987. He and Kawakubo married in 1992, at the Paris City Hall. It is a partnership with its own rhythms—while Joffe is based in Paris, his wife lives in Tokyo, in the upscale Aoyama neighborhood, walking distance to CDG’s flagship. (Kawakubo is reportedly the first one in the office in the morning and the last to leave at night.) When you see them together, he seems to serve as her protector—not just translating for her, but also shielding her from inquiries deemed too prying."[23]

Principal lines
  • Comme des Garçons
  • Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons
  • Tricot Comme des Garçons
  • Comme des Garçons Robe De Chambre (discontinued)
  • Comme des Garçons noir
  • Comme des Garçons Homme
  • Comme des Garçons Homme Plus
  • Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Evergreen
  • Comme des Garçons Homme Deux
  • Comme des Garçons Shirt
  • Play Comme des Garçons
  • Comme des Garçons Parfums
  • Comme des Garçons Wallet
  • Comme des Garçons Play
  • Comme des Garçons CDG

See also

Further reading
  • Deyan Sudjic. Rei Kawakubo and Commes des Garcons. Publisher: Rizzoli (1990). Language: English. ISBN 187218085X.
  • Unlimited: Comme des Garcons, Edited by Sanae Shimazu for NHK, Heibousha Press, 2003.
  • Koda, Harold. ReFusing Fashion. Paperback: 138 pages; Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (1 December 2008); Language: English; ISBN 097919914X.
  • Bonnie English. Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. Paperback: 192 pages; Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (25 October 2011); Language: English; ISBN 1847883109.
  • Terry Jones. Rei Kawakubo, Hardcover: 120 pages, Publisher: Taschen; Mul edition (30 December 2012), Language: English, ISBN 3836538911.
  • Andrew Bolton. Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between Hardcover, forthcoming 30 May 2017, Hardcover: 248 pages; Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art (30 May 2017); Language: English; ISBN 1588396207.
  • ディヤン スディック Deyan Sudjic『Rei Kawakubo and COMME des GARÇONS』マガジンハウス、1991年12月　 ISBN 4838702582
  • フランス グラン FRANCE GRAND『MÉMOIRE DE LA MODE COMME des GARÇONS』KORINSHA PRESS、1998年5月　 ISBN 4771329192
  • 南谷えり子『The Study of COMME des GARÇONS』リトル・モア、2004年7月　 ISBN 4898151000
  • 清水早苗・NHK番組制作班『Unlimited:COMME des GARÇONS』出版：平凡社、2005年6月　 ISBN 9784582620252
  • 『美術手帖 Vol.61 NO.931』美術出版社、2009年12月号
  • 『High Fashion No.332』文化出版局、2010年4月号
  • 『ROCKS SPECIAL ISSUE／反骨の人。オノ・ヨーコ／川久保玲』朝日出版社、2010年6月号
  • 『月刊 PEN No.307』 Hankyu Communications, 2012年 2/15号

References
  1. Vogue Magazine. Announcement of Kawakubo exhibition in New York 2017
  2. Thurman, Judith (4 July 2005). "The Misfit: Rei Kawakubo is a Japanese avant-gardist of few words, and she changed women's fashion". The New Yorker. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  3. "Rei Kawakubo | #BoF500 | The Business of Fashion". The Business of Fashion. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  4. Klensch, E. (1 August 1987). Fashion: Another world of style: Rei kawakubo. Vogue,177, 306-306, 307, 308, 309, 377.
  5. Bodine, S., & Idzelis, D. (2002). Kawakubo, Rei. In T. Benbow-Pfalzgraf (Ed.), Contemporary Fashion (2nd ed., pp. 365-368). Detroit: St. James Press.
  6. Andrew Bolton. Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between Hardcover, forthcoming 30 May 2017, Hardcover: 248 pages; Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art (30 May 2017); Language: English; ISBN 1588396207.
  7. "History of Fashion Designer Rei Kawakubo". marybawa.com. Archived from the original on 8 March 2016. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  8. Jodidio, Philip (2002). "Rei Kawakubo". Architecture Now! 2. 2. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-1594-6.
  9. Martin, Richard (1 January 1995). Contemporary fashion. ISBN 1558621733. OCLC 32746769.
  10. Unlimited: Comme des Garcons, Edited by Sanae Shimazu for NHK, Heibousha Press, 2003.
  11. Foley, Bridget (20 December 2013). "Rei Kawakubo Speaks". Women's Wear Daily. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
  12. Mower, Sarah (4 March 2006). "Comme des Garçons F/W 2006". style.com. Archived from the original on 3 July 2006. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  13. "Junya Watanabe - Designer Fashion Label". The Cut, New York Magazine. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  14. Mari Davis; Tom Massey; Boyd Davis. "Junya Watanabe". Fashion Windows. Archived from the original on 30 June 2013. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  15. "W: The Tao of design". Findarticles.com. Archived from the original on 9 August 2007. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  16. Liberty: Designer Room Archived 14 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  17. vmagazine.com Comme des Garçons and the most avant-garde underwear around Archived 23 January 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  18. "Comme des Garcons for H&M". Vogue. 3 April 2008. Archived from the original on 20 August 2010. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  19. Wells, Pete (17 September 2013). "Rei Kawakubo and H & M: A collaboration to watch". International Herald Tribune. Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 24 September 2013.
  20. "Meeting of two worlds - H&M/COMME DES GARÇONS debuts today in Tokyo".
  21. Woo, Kin (22 March 2016). "Gosha Rubchinskiy's Dover Street Market Photo Diary". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  22. Tim Blanks. Business of Fashion. "A Punk's Pain". 24 April 2017. .
  23. Yaeger, Lynn (13 April 2017). "On the Eve of the Comme des Garçons Retrospective, the Notoriously Reclusive Rei Kawakubo Speaks Out". Vogue. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  24. Schneier, Matthew (1 May 2017). "Rei Kawakubo, the Nearly Silent Oracle of Fashion". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  25. Livingston, Josephine (3 May 2017). "The Passion of Rei Kawakubo". The New Republic. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  26. Fury, Alexander (28 April 2017). "7 Key Themes in Rei Kawakubo's Career". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
  27. Fury, Alexander (28 April 2017). "7 Key Themes in Rei Kawakubo's Career". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
  28. Friedman, Vanessa (6 May 2017). "A Conversation About Rei Kawakubo, Founder of Comme des Garçons". The New York Times Times Talk. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
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