Understanding Rei Kawakubo
I recently pored through Andrew Bolton’s curation of Comme des Garçons, the May 2017 exhibit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rei Kawakubo is enigmatic. She feels more comfortable talking about making her clothes rather than the meaning of her clothes and, oftentimes, the names she gives her collections are the only explanations. Even with her patterners, she is reticent — the patteners are expected to interpret her few words. As Kawakubo describes, “Design starts with how each of my staff interprets the concept. The patterers are in fact designing.”
The biggest thing that stands out to me about Kawakubo is her obsession with newness, or originality — doing something that has never been seen before. Her fondness of her collections is swayed by whether or not the public understands it. “If I do something I think is new, it will be misunderstood,” she says, “but if people like it, I will be disappointed because I haven’t pushed them enough. The more people hate it, maybe the newer it is. Because the fundamental human problem is that people are afraid of change.”
Kawakubo introduces an interesting discourse between fashion versus art versus commerce. “All art is commercial,” she has stated. Her clothes share qualities with sculptures and conceptual / performance art. But she maintains that fashion is not art. “I’m not an artist doing a single painting, a piece that’s just meant to be shown on a wall. It’s an act of business that’s meant to be worn […] Fashion is not art. You sell art to one person. Fashion is something more personal and individual, because you express your personality. It is an active participation, art is passive.”
But Kawakubo acknowledges the intersectionality between her clothes and art. “Things that have never been seen before have a tendency to be somewhat abstract, but making art is not my intention at all. All my effort is oriented towards giving form to clothes that have never been seen before.”
Unlike many creatives, Kawakubo views the business element as central to her design process. Pulled from a 032c article:
Kawakubo once told Suzy Menkes, “It is true to say that I ‘design’ the company, not just clothes. Creation does not end with just the clothes. New interesting business ideas, revolutionary retail strategies, unexpected collaborations, nurturing of in-house talent, all are examples of Comme des Garçons’ creation.” Perhaps this is the most important point of all. Rather than seeing business thinking as a blight on the face of her conceptual approach to fashion, she views it as central to her creative process.
Her artistic approach to her clothing design process often seems contradictory to her business priorities. She knows some of her designs will be hard to sell. She states: “I [don’t] expect them to be easy garments to be worn every day, but CDG clothes should always be new to the world. It is more important to translate through into action rather than to worry about if one’s clothes are worn in the end.” She even mentions: “Personally I don’t care about function at all, but more than half the complaints I hear come from that perspective.” But it is Comme des Garçons. So it sells.
Even though you can always count on Kawakubo to always put out new pieces, there are some recurring signature designs that pop up all over her collections. After going over her collections from 1990 onwards, some I’ve noticed are:
- Excessive fabric manipulated into extravagant folds (pictured below) or pleats or topiary-like bushes (not pictured below)
- Bulbous, stuffed silhouettes (1st pic below)
- Lumps hanging onto / protruding out of silhouettes (2nd-3rd pic below)
- Tubing-like stuffed shapes attached like padding (1st-2nd below)
- Gargantuan, molded sculptures in cloth in flattish 2D shapes (3rd pic below)
- Stuffed fabric like pillow inserts (4rd pic below)
- Silhouettes: exaggerated hips & shoulders (1st pic), cocoon (2nd pic), and trapezoidal (3rd pic)
- Gaping holes (sometimes with scrunched hemming) like open wounds
- Lattices hung on the body
- Tulle, excessive and most likely in skirt formation
- Tartan and polka dots
- Rosettes and large bows
Frequently, the concept of freedom is a strong influence on her designs. Kawakubo also rejects standard beauty norms for women, declaring that “the sexual overkill and exposed bodies in fashion are the result of men designing for women. I think that more interesting results arise when women design for themselves.”
Selection of 31 Comme des Garçons Collections
A/W 1982, “Holes”: Rei’s famous black “lace” sweater pierced with holes, to which she stated that “those are tears to some, but to me they’re not tears. Those are openings that give the fabric another dimension.”
A/W 1995, “Sweeter than Sweet”: often described as Kawakubo’s most romantic and feminine collection, this collection started out with shroud-like silhouettes that constrained the arms, then with sheer lace dresses with embroidered flower details, finishing with jackets embroidered with a circles pattern that eventually made its way onto Kawakubo’s signature bulbous asymmetric silhouettes. “I want to express extreme sweetness, a sweetness that is almost overpowering”.
S/S 1997, “Body Meets Dress — Dress Meets Body”: Kawakubo’s personal favorite collection (or, in her words, her “least dissatisfying”) featuring “lumps and bumps” of deformed bodies, giving off an illusion of dysmorphia, reminiscent of Georgina Godley’s Hump and Bump collection of 1986. When asked to explain the collection, Kawakubo famously “sat down silently, drew a circle in blank ink on a scrap of white paper, then disappeared.” She describes that she “design[ed] bodies instead of clothes” in this collection.
Kawakubo also designed costumes for Merce Cunningham’s Scenario, a dance performance in which Rei dressed the dancers in humps and big rear ends that distorted even more with the dance routine.
Also, an interesting read: https://www.olivialeighreynolds.com/post/all-you-could-see-were-lumps-bumps.
A/W 1997, “Adult Punk”: Beautifully tailored ivory pieces embroidered with gold thread, but exposing red biker shorts underneath, before foraying out to black and purple pieces. Kawakubo says that her inspiration was to “start with something perfect and go backward”.
S/S 1998, “Clustering Beauty”: this show was scheduled back to back with Margiela’s show of totally flat clothing, whereas Kawakubo featured “heavy cartridge pleats on barrel like dresses and tulle stuffed bell skirts” and “vintage touches seemingly borrowed from children’s and bridalwear” (Vogue). Kawakubo says that the collection “evokes the beauty and strength that emerge trough repetition and stacking”.
A/W 1998, “Fusion”: Kawakubo fused together mismatched garments into one-armed tops and asymmetrical long coats. She mentions “I’m more comfortable with off-balance — the unbalanced and asymmetrical.” Vogue states that the clothes are conceived “almost like sculptures” and had to be viewed from all angles. This collection reminds me of Margiela’s affinity for recycling garments into other garments and turning them inside out.
In 2001, Kawakubo declared that “white is the new black.”
Her favorite color has always been black, stating “my clothes are not particularly feminine. They tend to be in dark colors, like men’s clothes.” In order of preference, Kawakubo’s preferred color palette is black, red, than gold… according to her, “when babies are given the choice of colors, they often choose gold”.
S/S 2004, “Abstract Excellence”: just skirts in the rawest form, seams showing and structural, with a stiff black trim on some of them. There were no other accessories complementing the skirts other than traditional headdresses worn by the Herero people in southern Africa. Kawakubo describes her process of making the shapes of the skirts as “abstract”, hence the title of her collection.
S/S 2005, “Ballerina Motorbike”: or, as Kawakubo calls it, ““Harley-Davidson meets Margot Fonteyn”. This collection juxtaposed stiff, cool leather biker jackets with beautiful sheer tutus and skirts.
A/W 2005, “Broken Bride”: Kawakubo wanted to break the rules of wedding dresses to show that “marriage is not necessarily happy” as marriage could represent the loss of freedom. This collection was about “anticonservatism”. (Kawakubo ends up disliking this collection as it was too easily understood by the public.) She states: “one’s lifestyle should not be affected by the formality of marriage.” The models wore flower crowns and antique lace veils and Victorian dresses fabricated from tulle, satin, and lace, most ivory but some black, some with peter pan collars, some with leg-of-mutton sleeves.
S/S 2006, “Lost Empire”: many critics thought this collection was odd due to the Union Jack prints and crowns, but Kawakubo said the collection was not paying homage to England but rather a “lost empire”. The clothes featured Kawakubo’s love for red tartan and was not cut by patterns but instead was created through draping, resulting in “wrappings of tulle that read as bulbous approximations of boleros, and bunchy skirts, swagged and ruched at the sides” (Vogue).
A/W 2006, “Persona”: this collection showed one’s persona, or “one’s personality as opposed to one’s inner self”, as explained by Kawakubo. According to her, the easiest way to express this was playing with masculinity and femininity as it was “liberating to express through clothes both sides of one’s character.” Frills and baroque Jacquard prints made their way onto the transplanted garments.
S/S 2007, “Cubisme”: this collection was subtly more eastern themed, perhaps due the huge red circles. Kawakubo says, “To me, the circle is the purest form of design in existence.” The collection featured wide belts worn high on jackets, t-shirts with words on them, sheer dresses and tulle accented and outlined with thick fabric.
S/S 2008, “Cacophony”: Disharmony and randomness. Models had colorful yarn-like hair and clown-like makeup. Vogue asks: how to make sense of this? Then answers: don’t try. Some consistent details of the collection include square, synthetic ruffle-edged drink coasters (according to Vogue; also first pic below), garments sliced in half and mashed together, skirts with knotted rags tied to the hems, nylon tutus patched to the front of skirts, and frilly long latticed bloomers (fifth picture below).
A/W 2008, “Bad Taste”: Kawakubo insists that “there’s value in bad taste” and it is in this collection that she states that she “played with notions of bad taste”. From a Vogue review: the collection featured a take on “trashy fifties net petticoats”, with “cheesy lip and heart motifs, the mouths opening as suggestive frilled portholes” and “lattices of elasticized satin-frilled garter straps connecting the gaps between chopped-up garments”.
S/S 2009, “Tomorrow’s Back”: as Kawakubo explains it, “I have always liked black. However, recently black has become as habitual as denim, so I wanted to find tomorrow’s black.” Tectonic shoulder pads, cocoon skirts and dresses made from hexagonal shapes that transitioned to a more natural petaled tufts like topiary (Vogue review). Julien D’ys, the head stylist behind every CDG runway show, merged hair, hat, and makeup into one for this show.
A/W 2009, “Wonderland”: pyramidal layerings of jackets and sweaters wrapped in flesh-colored tulle, capes squeezed underneath cropped jackets, and “super-fragile silhouettes that had pale, padded blanket edgings sewn in to indicate vestigial jackets” (Vogue). Sometimes the tulle squeezed the garments underneath into sleeker dresses, reminiscent of Margiela’s 1990 S/S collection. There was trompe l’oeil too (also reminiscent of Margiela’s tattoo t-shirt in 1989 S/S) through toes sketched on top of shoes and outlines of jackets / pants drawn on the front of other garments.
A/W 2010, “Inside Decoration”: the collection was full of bloated, stuffed fabric like padding that accentuated the shoulders and hips and outer layers stretched out trying to restrain the bulbous torsos. Kawakubo also brought back her favorite red tartan that also featured heavily in Lost Empire (S/S 2006) and Transformed Glamour (A/W 1999).
S/S 2010, “Adult Delinquent”: tops and vests made out of cut up shoulder pads, seemingly a slydig at current fashion’s obsession with shoulder pads.
S/S 2011, “No Theme (Multiple Personalities, Psychological Fear)”: pristine white outfits sheathed in black block segments like armor, black leather bra busts, Kawakubo’s signature large belts sitting high on the torso, spooky conjoined outfits, multiple jackets dangling off the model’s shoulders, and half garments mashed with half of another clothing item.
S/S 2012, “White Drama”: personally one of my favorite collections, featuring ceremonial, grand, and just utterly beautiful dresses. A central design theme was the oversized sleeves that hung to the knees (1st pic). Some other notable Kawakubo signatures crept through, including: pyramidal or constraining cocoon silhouettes (2nd pic), huge tulle skirts (3rd pic), wearable lattices (4th pic), excessive folds (5th pic), and topiary-esque ruffles (6th pic).
Kawakubo did not like this collection in retrospect. She states: “I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well. For me, White Drama was too easily understood, the concept too clear.”
Remaining journal entry continued in Part 2.
Source for pictures: Vogue Runway
