Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo is the founder, owner and continuing creative force of Comme des Garçons. She is often described as a Japanese avant-garde designer, but that shorthand misses half of the achievement. Since 1969 she has built an independent company capable of supporting clothes that resist easy consumption: garments may be torn, unfinished, padded into unfamiliar bodies or enlarged until they approach sculpture. At the same time, she has designed shops, publications and a retail network that make those experiments commercially possible. As of September 2026, she still designs the main Comme des Garçons womenswear collection and Comme des Garçons Homme Plus. (Nippon.com; Vogue Japan)

Her work is not a fixed uniform of black, asymmetry and holes. Those were decisive early tools, but Kawakubo tends to leave a visual solution once it becomes recognisable. What remains constant is a working principle: creation must produce something she has not seen before. In a 2024 Japanese interview, she connected “newness” to freedom, conscious living and the refusal of an existing mould. This is why a Comme des Garçons show is better approached as a question about the body, taste or social convention than as a seasonal variation on one house look. (Vogue Japan)

An education of the eye, not of the hand

Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942 and studied aesthetics in Keio University's Faculty of Letters. She had no formal dressmaking education. After university she joined the advertising department of the textile company Asahi Kasei, then left after several years to work as a freelance stylist. When she could not find the clothes an image required, she began making them herself. She started producing womenswear under the French name Comme des Garçons in 1969 and established the company in 1973. (Nippon.com; Fashion Press Japan)

That route matters. Kawakubo learned to control an entire image before she was known for cutting clothes. Her authorship has always extended to photography, graphics, casting, shop interiors and the rhythm in which a customer encounters an object. The first Comme des Garçons show took place in Tokyo in 1975, the same year the company opened its first direct shop in Aoyama. Menswear followed with Comme des Garçons Homme in 1978. (Fashion Press Japan; Vogue Japan)

Paris and the argument over black

Comme des Garçons first presented in Paris in 1981. The collections that established Kawakubo internationally used black, inexpensive-looking polyester, distressed knits, exposed construction and loose forms that did not describe the conventional idealised female body. At a moment when Paris fashion favoured polished glamour and emphatic shoulders, some Western reviews answered with insulting descriptions of poverty and disaster. In Japan, the customers who adopted head-to-toe black became known as カラス族 (karasu-zoku), the “crow tribe”. (Nippon.com; Fashion Press Japan)

The clothes were not important simply because they were dark. A dropped seam, an apparently accidental hole or an asymmetrical hem moved attention away from flawless finish and sexual display towards fabric, space and the wearer’s own agency. Calling the work “Japanese” could also become a way for European critics to keep it outside fashion’s supposed centre. Later scholarship has therefore re-examined how early coverage exoticised Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto instead of recognising two distinct designers arguing with Western standards from inside the Paris system. (Kyoto University; Japan Textile Machinery Society)

Black never disappeared, but Kawakubo did not allow it to harden into a formula. Once the colour was absorbed across fashion, she pushed into red, gold, florals and deliberately awkward combinations. The experimental men's line Homme Plus, begun in 1984, likewise used tailoring as material to be opened, displaced and rebuilt rather than as a code of correct masculine behaviour. (Fashion Press Japan; 2nd Street Japan)

Bodies that clothing had not imagined

Kawakubo's Spring 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body remains a hinge in late-twentieth-century fashion. Stretch gingham dresses contained irregular pads around the hips, shoulders, stomach and back. The additions did not improve the body according to familiar corsetry; they invented other anatomies. Press nicknames such as “lumps and bumps” reduced the proposition to shock, but the collection's lasting subject was the mutual discipline of clothing and the body—what each is permitted to make the other look like. (Nippon.com; Vogue Japan)

Choreographer Merce Cunningham responded by inviting Kawakubo to design the costumes and environment for Scenario in 1997. Dancers had to discover movement around the padded forms, turning a runway argument into a physical one. Other collections reversed underwear and outerwear, attached sleeves where they could not function normally, or joined opposing categories—biker and ballerina, beautiful and grotesque, garment and object. (Nippon.com; Fashion Press Japan)

From Spring 2014, beginning with a collection widely described as Not Making Clothes, Kawakubo reduced the number of looks and pushed the mainline further from ordinary ready-to-wear. Huge constructions could engulf the body and function as concentrated runway ideas, while the wider company continued to sell jackets, shirts, knitwear, wallets and fragrance. The apparent contradiction is the system: accessible and recognisable lines give the least compromising work room to exist. (Nippon.com; Vogue Japan)

A company designed like a collection

Kawakubo's influence also lies in the organisation she built. Comme des Garçons has allowed designers including Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara and Kei Ninomiya to develop separate labels within the company rather than requiring them to reproduce the founder's style. The result is not a ladder of simple diffusion lines: Watanabe's textile engineering, Tao's material delicacy and Ninomiya's modular black constructions retain distinct authorship. (Vogue Japan; Nippon.com)

In 2004 Kawakubo and her husband and business partner Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in London. Its “beautiful chaos” placed Comme des Garçons beside established houses, emerging designers, art and unexpected objects in spaces that resisted department-store hierarchy. The stores became both an international platform for independent designers and another medium for Kawakubo's spatial practice. (Fashion Press Japan; Vogue Japan)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art made that expanded practice the subject of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between in 2017. It was the Costume Institute's first monographic exhibition devoted to a living designer since its Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983. Organised around boundaries such as fashion/art, clothes/not clothes and self/other, it treated ambiguity—not one silhouette or decade—as the centre of her work. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Anger, war and the refusal of neutrality

Kawakubo rarely supplies a long explanation for a collection, but her short statements can locate the pressure behind it. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, her collections increasingly addressed grief, uncertainty and the hope of a brighter future. For Autumn/Winter 2024 she titled the womenswear collection ANGER, saying that the anger was directed at everything in the world and particularly at herself; chains, barbed-wire imagery and agitated movement carried the feeling without turning the show into a literal news report. (Vogue Japan)

The Autumn/Winter 2025 Homme Plus collection was more direct. Military garments were cut open and interrupted by bows, tulle and floral elements under the title The Hope of Light; the presentation was understood as a peace march in which the visual authority of uniform was dismantled. This is political work in Kawakubo's characteristic form: not a slogan printed on an unchanged product, but an argument made through the structure and social meaning of dress. (Vogue Japan; Nippon.com)

Reading the labels and dating the work

A Comme des Garçons label names a company and a particular line; it does not automatically mean Kawakubo personally designed the garment. Mainline Comme des Garçons and Homme Plus are the clearest Kawakubo-authored runway collections. Comme des Garçons Homme has had changing team leadership, while Junya Watanabe, Tao and Noir Kei Ninomiya are separate designer labels. PLAY, wallets and Shirt have their own product briefs. See the complete Comme des Garçons line and label guide before assigning authorship. (Fashion Press Japan; 2nd Street Japan)

Japanese care labels generally carry an alphanumeric product code whose line letter and two-digit AD code can identify the line and season. The code is stronger dating evidence than colour or styling: black, raw edges and asymmetry recur across decades and across different Comme des Garçons designers. A tenure date can narrow attribution, but only the complete label, product code and collection evidence can establish who designed a particular piece. (2nd Street Japan)

References

• Yoko Kuroiwa. “コムデギャルソン・川久保玲～「黒の衝撃」から半世紀、ファッションで「反骨精神」「反戦」を体現する挑戦者.” Nippon.com, 12 June 2026.
• Luke Leitch, Gen Arai and Yui Sugiyama. “川久保玲独占インタビュー──「新しい」とは自由であること.” Vogue Japan, 24 September 2024.
• Vogue Japan. “川久保玲が語る、コム デ ギャルソンの尽きない創造力と革新性.” 21 June 2017.
• Vogue Japan. “躍進するコム デ ギャルソンのDNA.” 28 January 2018.
• Itoi Kuriyama and Mayumi Numao. “コム デ ギャルソンのテーマは「ANGER – 怒り」.” Vogue Japan, 11 March 2024.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between.” 16 November 2015.
• Fashion Press Japan. “コム デ ギャルソン: COMME des GARÇONS.” Accessed September 2026.
• 2nd Street Japan. “〈コム デ ギャルソン〉の軌跡 vol.02.” 27 March 2021.
• Katsumi Nishi. “異国趣味の残像：コムデギャルソン（川久保玲）の初期コレクション.” Kyoto University, 2022.
• Japan Textile Machinery Society. “洋服ばなれのアヴァンギャルド・ファッション.” Journal of the Textile Machinery Society of Japan, Vol. 49, No. 5, 1996.