Rei Kawakubo

After graduating, Kawakubo worked for a textile company and began freelance styling in 1967.² She founded Comme des Garçons in 1969; early designs reportedly resembled the work of Sonia Rykiel.³ The label's first Paris show took place in 1981, and the French press reacted negatively to its minimalism and distress.⁴

The term 'Hiroshima chic' reportedly emerged from criticism of that collection.⁴ Kawakubo's early 1980s collections used a pure black palette and oversized, robe-like clothing, exploring concepts of emptiness (mu) and space (ma).⁴ Her color palette broadened somewhat from the late 1980s onward.²

In 1997, the 'Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body' collection used asymmetrical padding to distort body silhouettes; Vogue describes it as having been reviled.³ Former apprentice Junya Watanabe launched his own label in the early 1990s, and Kawakubo published the bi-annual magazine 'Six' in the same period.² According to The FMD - FashionModelDirectory.com, Kawakubo created an autumn guest designer collection for H&M in 2008.²

Since 2013, Kawakubo has replaced conventional catwalk shows with avant-garde presentation formats, such as staging her fall 2017 show in a former nineteenth-century ballroom in Paris.³ Vogue reported that Comme des Garçons had roughly 130 stores worldwide.³

In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute presented a retrospective on Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, making her the second living designer to receive such an honor after Yves Saint Laurent.^3,4,5 The exhibition, curated with Andrew Bolton, displayed about 150 pieces of Kawakubo's women's wear from the early 1980s to the present.⁴ The New Republic described the exhibition's geometric forms as concealing and cradling her clothes.⁴

Academic scholarship classifies Comme des Garçons and Kawakubo as deconstructive and countercultural Japanese fashion, using the body as a critical site of resistance.⁶ Journalists have described Kawakubo as legendary and her clothes as, while also noting her reclusive nature.^3,4 Getty's ULAN records that Kawakubo also designs store interiors for her clothing line.¹ According to a 2012 paper in Taschen eBooks, a monograph on Rei Kawakubo includes imagery by photographers Paolo Roversi, David Bailey, and Emma Summerton.⁷