Rei Kawakubo

Asymmetry, Distress and One Colour

Three features define Kawakubo's work, and each one refuses a convention. Warped asymmetry refuses balance: a garment is built so that its two sides do not mirror each other, which denies the eye the symmetry it expects from clothing and forces it to look at the piece as a constructed object rather than as a frame for the body. Distressed fabrics refuse finish: cloth that appears worn, holed or unfinished contradicts the luxury promise that new clothes should look perfect, and asks whether beauty can live in damage and imperfection instead. A monochromatic palette refuses colour as decoration: working in essentially one colour, most famously black, removes the easiest way of making a garment attractive and leaves only shape, texture and proportion to do the work. Any one of these refusals would mark a designer as experimental. Kawakubo built a career and a company on all three at once.

The combination explains why her rise to prominence in the early 1980s was an event rather than a trend. Paris fashion at that moment was polished, fitted and glamorous. Collections built on black, asymmetry and apparent damage did not offer a new version of that glamour; they questioned whether glamour was the point of clothing at all. That is what avant-garde means in practice — not stranger decoration, but a different answer to the question of what a garment is for. Kawakubo's answer treated clothes as ideas to be thought about as well as objects to be worn, and it permanently widened the range of what a fashion collection could legitimately do.

Comme des Garcons as a Business

The label's name, Comme des Garcons, is French for like the boys, or like small boys — a name that promises play and a refusal of adult formality, fitting a house whose clothes ignore the usual rules of grown-up elegance. Kawakubo is described as the label's part-time owner, an unusual arrangement that underlines how the house was structured around her design authority rather than around conventional full-time ownership. The commercial scale is substantial: boutiques around the world and a company grossing in the neighbourhood of 150 million dollars a year. Those figures matter because they disprove the easy assumption that avant-garde fashion survives only as a subsidised art project. Kawakubo's work showed that clothing built on asymmetry, distress and monochrome could support a global retail business — that there were enough customers, in enough cities, who wanted ideas in their wardrobes and not only flattery.

Her giving is also part of the record: she donates extensively to orphan relief and to Major League Baseball in the United States. The pairing is unexpected — children's welfare and American baseball, from a Japanese designer based in the world of Paris fashion — and it resists any tidy explanation. Taken at face value it simply shows interests and obligations wider than the industry she works in. For a designer whose public image is severe and intellectual, the philanthropy is a reminder that the person behind the monochrome collections has commitments that have nothing to do with fashion's own conversation, and that the company grossing 150 million dollars a year is run by someone who directs part of its success well outside the fashion world.