Interviewing Rei Kawakubo was not an easy task, and she habitually gave negative answers to any word-conscious question - "I don't know", "I don't follow", "I'm not interested". There is a strong sense of indisputability in just a few words, which makes it difficult and unnecessary to ask questions or seek more explanations. In the face of the proposed shooting needs, she carefully examined - which series and which look are the most representative; How can models, lighting, sets better present costumes... After everything is arranged, we can finally take out the treasures in the archive, brush away the dust of time with us, and unfold the timeless masterpieces to the world again.
It has been 50 years since the Comme des Garçons was founded in Tokyo in 1973. This number is a milestone for anything, a point in time when you can comfortably describe meaning and summarize achievements. But for Rei Kawakubo, it's no different from every day in the past: "Since I'm always creating new clothes, I always feel that nothing is perfect, or complete, and I never have a sense of accomplishment." Today, at the age of 80, she is as fearless and determined as she was when she disrupted the Parisian fashion scene.
Designer Rei Kawakubo
Rei Kawakubo's story seems to have begun in 1981. It had been eight years since she founded her brand Comme des Garçons in Tokyo. If we stretch the timeline and zoom out further, we can see her studying art and aesthetics at Keio University, doing research, collecting data, and designing advertisements in the advertising department of textile manufacturers, and leaving the company to become a freelance designer. As if guided by something, her life and fashion gradually converged like two parallel lines, until 1973 they completely coincided, merging into a long river that flows to this day.
Although he is not from a professional background, whether it is a talent or a textile company, making clothes has been particularly logical and convenient for Kawakubo Rei from the beginning. She has said that she does not regret not seeking professional fashion training, because there is enough time to train her eyes and cultivate beauty in natural ways. As for the rarely talked about early days, she recalls for us: "In a team of two or three people, I made the clothes I wanted to make, put them in a travel bag, and peddled them everywhere to shops with good images. I did all this myself, buying fabrics and sending them to the factory, and designing patterns. ”
And she is not satisfied with just doing it silently in her hometown. In 1981, Rei Kawakubo was determined to bring the Comme des Garçons to a wider fashion scene. As an interloper, she injects a heavy dark color into the colorful, romantic and light Paris. The models on the runway wear black cloth wrapped around their bodies in various poses, boring, ragged, even terrifying, far from the vision of fashion dreams that have long been rooted in the Western system. Confused and puzzled, fashion reporters on the show unceremoniously wrote in their notebooks descriptions such as "disaster is imminent", "fashion that looks poor", and "it is better to wear when you go to the tax office to pay taxes".
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2023 collection
wig Arai Takeo; Gary Card
At this moment, we don't know Kawakubo's mood, but if you want to make a bold guess, she must be secretly proud of her seemingly quiet appearance. She never sought recognition, or even rejected understanding. Because if the clothes you make can be accepted by everyone in an instant, it means that you have not created anything completely new. And the hierarchical fashion interface is naturally an instinctive reaction to reject and criticize these obscure and uncontrollable new things - everyone wants to be successful in their familiar territory, refuses to change, and is even more afraid of subversion.
Rei Kawakubo said that he did not deliberately set off a change, but just wanted to issue a new declaration, and it happened that his concept was different from others. The controversy she caused was enormous and the attention was unprecedented. Jean Paul Gaultier, a designer known for his bold and exaggerated avant-garde design aesthetic, said: "This level of shock was the first time, when fashion was traditional and boring, and it brought a very strong fresh power. Karl Lagerfeld, who was already popular at that time, also praised this peer, "Although you will see the ugly side, although you will feel negative emotions such as fear, it has a new beauty." ”
This "new beauty" was reinforced in subsequent collections, such as Comme des Garçons' Fall/Winter 1982 collection "Holes", in which a black top full of large and small holes was ridiculed by fashion critic Suzy Menkes as a "Swiss cheese sweater", while Rei Kawakubo called it "new lace", another way to look at fabrics. She doesn't like the polished smooth and flawless, without a trace of flawless industrial feeling, such "loopholes", such imperfections and unfinished, which is more interesting and can highlight the value of ordinary things. Rei Kawakubo never cared about the entrenched rules, and even openly expressed her disinterest in fashion, "the only interest is the new and unprecedented clothes themselves"; Like an outsider who looked at the overall situation, she quietly entered the center of the system, and suddenly shook the aesthetics that had dominated for a hundred years.
Without the presence of the news media, Kawakubo probably did not intend to attach any interpretation to her work. The Comme des Garçons collections before 1981 have few written materials, and most of them don't even have names. It wasn't until she came to Paris, facing the media with a mature operating system, and facing the crowd of journalists, that she conceived a topic for each series with the mentality of handing in homework. It's not so much a title as a puzzle that provides information and puzzles — Spring/Summer 1983 "Patchworks and X", Spring/Summer 1987 "Young Chic, No shoulder", Fall/Winter 1987 "White Shirt+Pants, Khaki, Lili." Marleen）...... Words that seem unrelated are randomly pieced together. She is very frank about this, saying that she does not like to explain clothing, whether it is the process of production, or the theme or meaning, because good work should speak for itself, and what you see and feel is far more vivid than specious information.
For example, Comme des Garçons' most iconic spring/summer 1997 collection "Body Meets Dress - Dress Meets Body", the shoulders, waist, buttocks and other places of the clothes are filled with plump down, like a deformed lump that spreads from various parts, which is not only integrated with the body, but also eliminates the form of the body itself - sexy, emaciated, plump. It is difficult to describe what you see in any common words. When the eyes are full, we can't help but wonder whether the design intention behind it is about the gender paradigm, about the aesthetic standards imposed by society, or about the relationship between clothing and the body. Compared to these autonomous thought processes, it no longer matters what the final answer is, and Kawakubo's purpose has been achieved. Fashion historian and curator Valerie Steele once commented: "There was a violence, even a brutalism, in her work that made most of the fashion of the time look innocent and vulgar." From that moment on, avant-garde art split from the mainstream and galloped in its own direction. Although Kawakubo was silent, she still stirred up ripples of thought.
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 1997 collection
"Body Meets Costume - Costume Meets Body"
（Body Meets Dress - Dress Meets Body）
If that's comforting to the public, journalists, and everyone who has felt Kawakubo's reticent words—she still cherishes the printmakers she has worked with for decades. When she had the prototype of the series in her mind, she would communicate with the pattern maker through a few vague words or inconsequential descriptions, such as "the edge of the edge when changing the pillowcase", "a crumpled cardboard played with in childhood", etc., relying on tacit understanding to pass the baton of design.
In the documentary "Rei Kawakubo's Challenge" released by Japan's NHK television in 2001, even the pattern makers who have worked for Kawakubo Rei for more than ten years will look embarrassed after receiving the "title" issued by her herself. Because each time is something completely different, there is very little reference data left behind, and you have to start all over again. The reason for this operation is because in Kawakubo's view, if the layout is provided directly, everyone will undoubtedly do it, without any room for thinking and innovation. So, although the decryption process is painstaking, only then can we work together to create something completely new.
The climax of this 49-minute documentary is Rei Kawakubo's "acceptance moment" – on the eve of the team's rush from Tokyo to Paris to release the new collection, the patternmakers push the gantry full of new season samples to the preparation room, where the originally empty room is crowded by the addition of patternmakers, models, and clothes, and the employees of the production management department stand in a row against the wall, waiting to watch and learn. The tense atmosphere condensed in the air, culminating at the moment when Rei Kawakubo pushed the door in. She had no expression on her face, like an impartial examiner, carefully examined it, and left. At all times, there is a calmness and restraint in her, giving madness to the work and rationality to herself. She pays little attention to things outside of the creation itself—what the public expects, the outside world evaluates, what she achieves. As she puts it: "I don't have any particular feelings about what people think of Comme des Garçons. How people feel when they see and put on these clothes is a result, but not my goal. I just focus on thinking about creating new things. ”
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2009 collection
"Tomorrow's Black"
Tiara Julien d'Ys
In 2017, Rei Kawakubo was the subject of the annual exhibition of the Fashion Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is the second time in the history of the Met to hold a solo exhibition for a surviving fashion designer, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. In a conversation with curator Andrew Bolton, she confessed that she didn't want a retrospective because she regretted many of the clothes she had made, and if possible, it would be better to show only seven of the latest collections from the spring/summer of 2014, because "they are in the same place as my current mind, in the same now." In the end, of course, both sides compromised – Bolton curated in the form of thematic narratives, and Rei Kawakubo produced representative works by Comme des Garçons from the 80s to the present.
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2014 collection
"Not Making Clothing"
Perhaps the more deep-rooted reason than the humble reason for making clothes that you regret is that Rei Kawakubo is a person who lives in the present and does not easily look back on the past. Because she knows that if she wants to constantly create something that has never been the same, she must not be hindered by past experience, and if she wants to travel light, she must let go of the baggage. Rather than an established fashion house, which valued the archive more than anything else, she avoided the treasures she had accumulated for half a century, because it was so rich that a single scoop could irrigate an entire collection. But she refuses to indulge herself in doing so, because only fresh ideas that are truly completely alien can bring the motivation to create, and only then can they have the meaning of being brought into the world. As a master that countless people look up to, every piece of clothing she designs is repeatedly studied, and every word she says is repeatedly tasted, does this bring a sense of achievement and pressure? "I just care about my life and how I feel," she says.
This answer, so unexpected, so reasonable. As Cindy Sherman, an avant-garde artist with whom she is sympathetic, puts it, Kawakubo "does not respond to anyone's expectations." She actively dissolves the grandeur, meaning and flowery rhetoric that the outside world has placed on her, such as calling her brand "like a boy" (the Chinese interpretation of Comme des Garçons) does not mean that she advocates feminism, but only likes the rhythm of the collision of these French words; For example, the usual deconstruction and other avant-garde techniques are not the same as she is a postmodernist, just a realist who studies fabrics and techniques in a down-to-earth manner; For example, after 40 years as clothes, in the spring/summer 2014 collection, she decided to start a new chapter with an ironic name, "Not Making Clothing".
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2023 collection
wig Arai Takeo; Headgear Valeriane Venance
It is almost impossible for Rei Kawakubo to give "testimonials" about the past 50 years. From the business empire with Comme des Garçons at its core, which includes several sub-line brands, to the pioneer Dover Street Market, which she founded with her husband Adrian Joffe, she summed up this unusual journey in the simplest language as "making clothes, running a business about making clothes, and then ordinary human life itself, nothing is perfect, everything is unfinished". But she also said that even though time and experience make innovation more and more challenging, she "will continue to look for and believe that she can still find some new inspiration" because when she touches "a new idea, a world that you have never seen before", she feels a powerful energy gushing out.
When he arrived in Paris in early 1981, even well-informed industry insiders would be confused by the Comme des Garçons – was this fashionable? In an interview in 2001, Kawakubo said, "Many years have passed, and people's perceptions [of my works] have changed from 'things that can barely be worn' to 'beautiful clothes,' 'there is more beauty,' and I would be happy if young people could feel and accept this." Now, more than two decades later, although many still have doubts about 1981, many more are inspired by her work and feel the resonance. Rei Kawakubo may not need this understanding, because she has already plunged headlong into the creation of something new; But young people who are thirsty for knowledge need it, the fashion industry needs to update and iterate, and the needs of modern society are becoming more and more diverse.
Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2023 collection
Wig Arai Takeo
Fall/Winter 1983 Collection "Gloves, skirts, quilted coats"
（Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats）
Spring/Summer 1992 Collection "Unfinished"
（Unfinished）
Spring/Summer 1995 Collection "Beyond Gender"
（Transcending Gender）
Spring/Summer 1997 Collection "Body Meets Clothing - Clothing Meets Body"
（Body Meets Dress - Dress Meets Body）
Fall/Winter 2005 Collection "The Broken Bride"
（Broken Bride）
Fall/Winter 2008 Collection "Bad Taste"
（Bad Taste）
Spring/Summer 2009 Collection "Tomorrow's Black"
（Tomorrow’s Black）
Spring/Summer 2014 Collection "Don't Make Clothes"
（Not Making Clothing）
Fall/Winter 2015 Collection "Rites of Separation"
（Ceremony of Separation）
Fall/Winter 2016 Collection "18th Century Punk"
（18th-Century Punk）
Spring/Summer 2021 collection
Spring/Summer 2023 collection
Photo by Fish Zhang
Styling: Michelle Zhao
Models: Macoto, Yutong
Co-ordinator: Guo Yuenu Summer Guo
Makeup: Shinya Kumazaki
Hairstyle: Kazuki Fujiwara
Executive Producer: Twin Brains
Photographic assistant: Asano Kyoko
Edited by/written by Lexi Chen
Art: Xiao B