Commes des Kawakubo
“You think I’m not normal because you’re looking at the clothes,” she said. “But I am. Can’t rational people create mad work?”
This quote is from a profile of avant-garde Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, The Misfit, that ran in The New Yorker in 2005.
She was speaking to journalist Judith Thurman well-before her designs and brand Commes des Garcons (CDG) achieved peak strangeness, then mainstreamed.
Nowadays CDG's heart-with-eyes logo is everywhere you look. On cotton t-shirts. On canvas sneakers. On scented candles.
Part of this wider acceptance can be attributed to tie-ups with mass-audience brands like Converse and New Balance.
Part of it can also be linked to the big-banner retrospective that The Metropolitan Museum mounted in 2017 that exposed the world to this bad girl of the fashion world.
Presented by the Costume Institute, the exhibition presented nearly 150 examples of Kawakubo's work dating back to the 1980's.
The connective thread grouping the examples was what Kawakubo called experiments in 'in-betweenness' for example Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Then/Now, High/Low, and Clothes/Not Clothes.
Her goal with these experiments was to break down the imaginary boundaries between such dualisms, exposing their arbitrariness.
I may be projecting, but this seems to pull from the Buddhist idea of nonduality. That there is not one thing or another, but rather a place for everything. A kind of simultaneous all-ness. *
While making a summer pilgrimage to New York from Tokyo that summer, my daughter Helenka and I went to the show at The Met and it has stayed with me. The clothing forms. The arrangement of the gallery. The simplified color palette - blacks, whites, reds. And especially, the strange heads and wigs styled by Kawakubo's longtime collaborator, Julien d'Ys (pronounced “deese”).
Twenty years ago, Thurman observed in her New Yorker profile that the pursuit of originality, of newness, was the defining characteristic of Kawakubo's work. And it still seems to be the case today - getting newer and older at the same time.
You can learn more about Commes des Garcons and Rei Kawakubo here ...
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/rei-kawakubo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei_Kawakubo
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/04/the-misfit
* Speaking of nondualism, I love Irving Penn's portrait of Kawakubo above. Face lit. Eyes closed quietly. Perhaps dreaming-up something crazy. For a rule-breaking bad girl of the fashion world, she seems quite at-peace in the moment.
