Tao Kurihara

Kurihara Tao (栗原たお) has designed inside Comme des Garçons for close to three decades, but her name has appeared on two distinct labels. She joined the company in 1998 and became chief designer of Tricot Comme des Garçons in 2002. A separate Paris womenswear collection, TAO COMME des GARÇONS, ran from 2005 to 2011. Kurihara then concentrated on Tricot until Spring/Summer 2022, when that line was renamed tao. The present label is therefore a continuation of Tricot, not an uninterrupted run of her first namesake collection. (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 French for “knit,” and Tricot Comme des Garçons was one of the group's oldest lines: a knitwear-based collection shown in Tokyo rather than Paris, positioned as more wearable than the Paris mainline. Taking it over gave Kurihara an established design language and production system before she received a Paris platform of her own. (Fashion Press)

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 Spring/Summer 2011, six years after its debut. The company said Kurihara wanted a change of lifestyle and preferred to concentrate her creative energy on Tricot, then shown twice a year in Tokyo. Kurihara did not publish a separate explanation. (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 reading “tao” can belong to either of two non-overlapping products. The original TAO COMME des GARÇONS, sold from 2005 to 2011, carried its own code within the company's production system; the current tao inherited Tricot Comme des Garçons's code when the line was renamed in 2022. The original tao uses line code 3, while Tricot and the present tao use T. For the full sequence, see how Comme des Garçons lines and date codes work. (2nd Street Japan)

A garment coded 3 can only come from the closed 2005–11 label. A garment coded T may be Tricot from 2002–21 or tao from 2022 onward, because the line kept its letter when the printed name changed. A resale listing that says only “Tao Comme des Garçons,” without a season or code, is therefore ambiguous between collections separated by eleven years and a decade of Tricot production. (Fashion Press; 2nd Street Japan)

The line letter sits beside the wider Comme des Garçons AD-year code, the sequence on the care label that records the design year independently of retail season. The 3 or T identifies the line; the AD code supplies the year. Both are needed to separate the original tao, Tricot and the present tao. (2nd Street Japan)

References

• Fashion Press. "タオ(トリコ・コム デ ギャルソン) : TAO." Accessed September 2026.
• Fashion Press. "タオ 2022年春夏コレクション — 白に咲く繊細な花々." 20 October 2021.
• WWD Japan. "「トリコ・コム デ ギャルソン」から「タオ」に改名 栗原たお." October 2021.
• SPUR. "対話から生まれるニューワードローブ。新しいtao、始まりの白." 16 February 2022.
• Fashion Snap. "タオ コム デ ギャルソンがブランド終了." 18 January 2011.
• Fashion Snap. "トリコ コム デ ギャルソンが「タオ」にブランド名変更 自分らしさを表現する"白"の22年春夏." October 2021.
• WWD. "Tao Comme des Garçons Label to End." 18 January 2011.
• The Pleat. "Unfolded: Tao Kurihara, The Quietest Member of The Comme Universe." 2024.
• Wikidata. "Tao Kurihara (Q11535799)." Accessed September 2026.
• 2nd Street Japan. "〈コム デ ギャルソン〉の軌跡 vol. 03." 13 March 2021.