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Tao Kurihara

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Japanese designer behind Comme des Garçons's tao, who closed her 2005–2011 namesake label and relaunched it under the same name in 2022.

Kurihara Tao (栗原たお) has designed inside Comme des Garçons for close to three decades, but her name has belonged to two different labels at two different times, and the sequence is worth getting right. She joined the company in 1998; became chief designer of its Tokyo-shown knitwear collection, Tricot Comme des Garçons, in 2002; launched a separate, Paris-shown womenswear collection under her own name in 2005; closed that collection in 2011 and went back to designing Tricot alone; and in 2022 saw Tricot itself renamed tao, the name under which she designs today. English-language coverage of Kurihara is thin and frequently compresses the 2005–2011 label and the 2022 relaunch into one continuous "Tao Comme des Garçons," or reverses the order of the Tricot appointment and the eponymous launch. Japanese trade press — Fashion Press's brand chronology, WWD Japan's report on the 2021 rename, and Fashion Snap's contemporaneous coverage of both the 2011 closure and the 2022 relaunch — agree on the 1998 / 2002 / 2005 / 2011 / 2022 sequence used here. (Fashion Press; WWD Japan; Fashion Snap)

Where Junya Watanabe's namesake collection pushes pattern and material past their expected limits, Kurihara's work stays inside a narrower, more legible register: frills, tulle, lace, ruffled volume and a palette built around white. It reads as more conventionally feminine than most of the Comme des Garçons group's output, and that appears to be closer to the point than a coincidence of taste — Kurihara has said she renamed Tricot to tao specifically to express her own identity more clearly than the Tricot name allowed. (WWD Japan)

From Central Saint Martins to Tricot

Kurihara was born in Japan in 1973. She trained in London, graduating from Central Saint Martins in 1997, and joined Comme des Garçons the following year. Japanese sources do not record a specific title for her first years inside the company; what they agree on is the next step. In 2002 she was appointed designer of Tricot Comme des Garçons, succeeding Junya Watanabe, who had led the line since 1987 before establishing his own namesake collection in 1992. (Fashion Press)

Tricot is simply French for "knit," and Tricot Comme des Garçons is one of the group's oldest lines: a knitwear-based collection shown in Tokyo rather than Paris, positioned as more wearable and less experimental than the Paris mainline or Watanabe's own collection. Taking it over gave Kurihara a design language and a production system to work from before she had a Paris platform of her own — a route into authorship closer to Watanabe's own path through the company than to a graduate handed a blank collection.

A namesake label of her own, 2005–2011

Attaching a staff designer's own name to a Comme des Garçons collection is rare: Watanabe had been the only person inside the company with one, since 1992. In 2005, Kurihara became the second, when Comme des Garçons launched TAO COMME des GARÇONS, a womenswear collection carrying her own name and first shown in Paris for Autumn/Winter 2005. (Fashion Press)

The label built a consistent identity across its Paris seasons: girlish volume worked through often laborious construction rather than straightforward prettiness — knit corsetry, crocheted camisoles, hand-finished lace grafted onto trench coats, and embroidered linens and handkerchiefs patched into new garments. Recurring silhouette details included Peter Pan collars, tiered ruffles, puffed skirts and strapless ruched gowns, usually finished with oversized bows or embellished Mary Janes. One retrospective English-language account of the collection describes the recurring effect as "wonderfully feminine garments" built from "unconventional materials" sourced from Japan and China, reworked through techniques closer to lingerie- or homeware-making than eveningwear — whimsical in silhouette, but "deeply technical and intellectually rigorous" in construction. (The Pleat)

At its widest distribution, TAO COMME des GARÇONS reached roughly fifty specialty stores worldwide, including Comme des Garçons's own boutiques, with U.S. stockists such as Barneys New York, If SoHo in New York and Ikram in Chicago — a scale that puts its output within reach of a catalogue like this one, even though the label ran for only six years. (WWD)

Comme des Garçons ended TAO COMME des GARÇONS after the Spring/Summer 2011 season; the closure was reported by Japanese and international trade press on 18 January 2011, six years after the label's debut. The company's stated reason, as quoted by WWD at the time, was that Kurihara "wants to have a change of lifestyle and prefers to concentrate her creative energies on the ever-popular label Tricot Comme des Garçons, shown in Tokyo twice a year." Kurihara has not given a public account of the decision in her own words; the company statement is the only sourced reasoning available, and this profile does not go beyond it. (Fashion Snap; WWD)

Ten years inside Tricot, then the name returns

For roughly a decade after 2011, Kurihara designed Tricot Comme des Garçons alone, without a separate Paris platform. That changed on 19 October 2021, when the company showed a Spring/Summer 2022 collection under a new name: tao, replacing Tricot Comme des Garçons outright rather than sitting alongside it. Kurihara gave her own reasoning to WWD Japan: after years of accumulated experience designing within Tricot's more commercial brief, she wanted to express her own identity more strongly and more clearly than that name allowed. ("長く経験を積んだことで、さらに自分らしさを強くしていきたいという気持ちがあった.") (WWD Japan)

The debut collection, titled MY WHITE, worked through a vocabulary close to the one established at the original label — gathering, lace, frills and ruffles rendered across shades from pure white to off-white and ivory, with a contrasting black section at its centre — alongside relief sculptures by the British artist Geoffrey Preston, printed onto plain T-shirts. Fashion Press described the effect as returning to a dolly-like silhouette reminiscent of the 2005–2011 label, now worked in a more restrained, adult register. As of September 2026, Kurihara continues to design tao twice yearly in Tokyo. (Fashion Press; Fashion Snap)

Design as two dialogues

In an interview given around the 2022 relaunch, Kurihara described her process as built from two kinds of dialogue. The first is with the people who make her clothes: she visits embroiderers and textile makers in person rather than working only through intermediaries, saying that speaking and listening for herself matters, because visiting a production site is where energy enters the work through conversation. (SPUR)

The second dialogue is internal. Kurihara has said an idea for a collection does not arrive as a single decision but accumulates from daily impressions until it eventually coheres, and that the deeper choices are ones she has to reach alone. Asked how she arrived at white as the identity of tao's first collection under its new name, she said the colour emerged naturally once she began thinking about how tao's expression should differ from Tricot's — and that she stayed conscious of the wearability Tricot had established even while pushing further into pure design expression, so that some pieces in the collection are built around ease and others purely around what she wanted a viewer to see. (SPUR)

Two eras, one name: reading tao's labels

A Comme des Garçons garment or tag reading "tao" could belong to either of two separate, non-overlapping products, and the difference is not always legible from the garment alone. The original TAO COMME des GARÇONS, sold 2005–2011, carried its own line code within the company's production and date-code system; the current tao, in production since the 2022 rebrand, inherited Tricot Comme des Garçons's code instead of being assigned a new one. For the full label sequence and how to read the accompanying AD-year code, see how Comme des Garçons lines and date codes work, which records the original 2005–11 tao as line code 3 and the renamed Tricot-turned-tao line as T.

That distinction is the practical test for dating a piece. A garment coded 3 can only be from the closed 2005–2011 label and predates the current collection entirely; a garment coded T could be from any Tricot Comme des Garçons season between 2002 and 2021, or from tao proper from 2022 onward, since the brand kept its line letter through the rename and only the name printed on the tag changed. Resale listings that give only "Tao Comme des Garçons," without a season or a code, should be treated as ambiguous between two collections designed by the same person eleven years apart, produced under two different systems, with a decade of plain Tricot Comme des Garçons production sitting between them and carrying no "tao" name at all.

The line letter sits alongside the same AD-year code used across the wider Comme des Garçons group — the two-letter, single-digit sequence sewn into a garment's care label that records the design year independently of the retail season. Reading the 3 or T line code without also checking the AD-year code will date a tao garment to the wrong era; reading the AD-year code without the line code will not tell a buyer which of the two tao labels, or Tricot Comme des Garçons before it, actually produced the piece. Both figures are necessary, and neither substitutes for the other.

References

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20Fw Az T216 051 4
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Comme Des Garcons Short-Sleeved Crewneck T-Shirt
Comme Des Garcons Short-Sleeved Crewneck T-Shirt
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Comme Des Garcons Short-Sleeved Crewneck T-Shirt