Rei Kawakubo is a polarising figure in fashion. Her artistic career began in Japan, where she studied fine arts at Keio University. After much training and freelance work, she began her label Comme des Garçons (‘like boys’) in 1973, allegedly naming it after a line in a French song that express sadness over a girl trying to be like a boy.
Mystery has been emblematic of Kawakubo’s career. She is notorious for disliking interviews, and to those that she accepts, she has her husband Adrian Joffe answer in her place. If she answers personally, it is always a crushing one-liner or a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Her clothes are notoriously anti-fashion and have challenged the industry’s perceptions on what clothes should be, as well as sending a commentary about the world and society, in similar fashion to other art mediums. She believes that her most successful collections are the ones that are the least well understood and the most ambiguous to critics. To me personally, when well done, this is more interesting than making things look aesthetically pleasing.
One of my favourite collections of hers was the 2006 FW ‘Persona’ collection. This fused elements of male and female fashion tropes to create a captivating and interesting message about the crossroads and boundaries of male and female clothing.
These concepts and garments are in fact, rather tame for a Rei Kawakubo collection. One of her most controversial, and in fact revolutionary collections, was the 1997 SS ‘Lumps and Bumps’ collection.
This collection featured various distorted and ‘ballooned’ pieces of clothing, possessing the same shape as something such as cancerous tumours. In the 1980’s, padding was used to make women’s shoulders broader.
Kawakubo saw this and chose to go the route less travelled. The collection made use of padding to create grotesque, deformed, and Frankenstein-like figures of otherwise ‘beautiful’ models. Rather than the clothes being formed by the body, the body was formed by the clothes.
With the close-minded critics, the collection was initially misunderstood and its purpose misinterpreted. It was seen as ugly, distorted, and unfeminine. The best critics, however, saw the exact opposite of unfeminine. Kawakubo’s garments were a critique of what was seen as beautiful. She also released a statement regarding this;
Obviously, these clothes were not made to be worn outside in public, something that many seem to miss. That is not the aim of most of Kawakubo’s fashion design. Her work has changed my perception on how garments can be just as expressive a medium as other media that have been widely accepted by society and the artistic world.