Commes Des Garcon

“I just decided to make a company built around creation, and with creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight,”

Rei kawakubo of Comme des garcon ( translates as like the boys ) created her iconic fashion brand around an anger at the cooperate fashion industry which she believes ‘distorts creation’ and allows ‘uninteresting fashion to thrive’.

For more than four decades, she has continually upset the industry by challenging accepted standards of beauty. Among the many tipping points in her career was the bulbous, padded Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress collection of 1996: “Critics denounced the designs as ‘tumor’ dresses,” Vogue later observed, “but Kawakubo weathered the outrage, and her larger achievement—her avant-garde triumph—was that she gave people a chance to feel passionately about fashion.”

But her creation does not stop at clothes; she also has a perfume line. In keeping with the theme of the company, her perfumes are far from ordinary, with sour hints of burnt rubber, and flaming rock. She told Vogue in 1995 the perfume “is a gift to oneself, not something to appeal or attract the opposite sex.” This is something that is also obvious of her clothes- she says she designs for women ‘who are not swayed by what her husband thinks.” She is going against all the worst industry stereotypes of fashion, she does not create clothes which present woman ,or men for that matter, in a way society think they should look but instead in an expressive and beautifully creative manner.

Furthermore she challenges the way the consumers of the fashion world shop and buy their clothes. Her brand can often be found in unexpected and surprising venues, with pop up shops in offbeat locations away from traditional fashion capitals—an old bookstore in Berlin, for instance, and under a bridge in Warsaw, Poland.




Her designs are certainly passionate and have pushed the bounds of creation. She has constantly battled conformity and the way that designers would create clothes for what society thought people should look like; During the 1980s, Kawakubo’s inky, seemingly formless, garments stood in direct opposition to the bright, body-conscious clothing championed by the likes of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana. Throwing political correctness to the wind, Montana once labeled Kawakubo’s controversial look “post-atomic.” She was also commonly insulted with the label “ragpicker”; and, in 1983, The Christian Science Monitor suggested that “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys) might more aptly be titled Comme des Clochards (Like the Tramps).” However the expression ‘no press is bad press’ is quite fitting as  Kawakubo later noted that she was thankful for this early aggression as it  was what put her fashion brand on the map.

  

And on the map she well and truly is, as many years on, she continues her battle against conformity and has established the brand as one of the most well respected in the industry. Rei has achievements have gone from strength to strength, from being rewarding an Excellence in Design Award from Harvard University to comparisons of her influence being made to the likes of Balenciaga and Coco Chanel. Not to mention the all time flattery in the form of an official nod from Disney as the 2004 film screen hit Incledibles featured a character named Edna “E” Mode who is said to be modeled after Kawakubo.

“When I began, I was fighting the resistance to change and fear of new things,” Kawakubo tells Vogue. “It was more about a personal struggle. But through the years it’s become more, bigger, wider. Now the fight is against the outside system.” Kawakubo is an amazing and passionate designer and one which I have a lot of respect for despite only becoming aware of her brand and its interesting story just months ago. I believe everything her and her brand stand for have a huge influence on the way consumers look at the fashion industry and the way the fashion industry operates. Whoever knew a brand from such a fickle seeming industry, as fashion could be so politically involved and outspoken?

Vogue predicted in 1987 that this designer of one-step-further fashion would be recognized “as the woman who will lead fashion into the twenty-first century.” And so she has.