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June 9, 2009
Positive Energy: Comme at 40
By SUZY MENKES
LONDON — Comme des Garçons is marking its 40th anniversary by bringing out a guerrilla-style, temporary brand called “Black” that epitomizes the style, the inventiveness and the originality of its founder.
Rei Kawakubo created black as the color of fashion’s rebel yell. She might have pronounced later, in her enigmatic way, that “red is the new black” and made that vivid color — checkered or regal — part of her repertoire.
But the Japanese designer did not just put women in black like a flock of crows flying across the brash 1980s. More significantly she, in the words of the innovative fashion retailer Carla Sozzani, “interpreted a change of mind in women and opened up a whole vision of femininity.”
Ms. Kawakubo, 66, is one of the great fashion forces from the last decades of the 20th century to now. Integral to her success is that she is too original to be pigeonholed — although others may see her as a symbol of feminism, judging her by the chic severity of an unvarnished face under a straight fringe, complex but plain clothes and flat shoes.
In fact, the guiding force of a fashion life that stretches way beyond clothes is an urge to think forward, encapsulated in new projects this month — from the “Black” stores to a collaboration with Vogue Nippon and an exhibition at the Paris store Colette.
Speaking in Japanese, which was translated by her husband and fellow fashion soul Adrian Joffe, Ms. Kawakubo talked about her early years in Tokyo, as she moved from studying ethics and literature to textile advertising to starting her own label — Comme des Garçons, or “like the boys” — in 1969.
“I really felt that I was on my own,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman. I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. 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.”
That struggle might seem to be over, as the first of the 10 worldwide “Black” stores, aiming to introduce “positive energy” in hard times, opened in Tokyo (Paris is due in two weeks), with perennial Comme looks.
Not only has Ms. Kawakubo been publicly recognized as an artist, with many awards, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. She has also built an independent fashion company with a turnover of $180 million in 2008, yet with an international reputation for creativity unsullied by commerce. She has made the headquarters in Tokyo’s Aoyama district a hatching stall for new talent, with three designers — Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara and Ganryu — building their own brands under Comme’s protection.
“It is true to say that I ‘design’ the company, not just clothes,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “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 Garçon’s creation.”
It is a rare designer who can tune a fiercely independent spirit to another fashion register. Yet among the many Comme collaborations are Levis, Lacoste, Fred Perry and Speedo. Ms. Kawakubo even turned over last year a “roaming” Aoyama store (which she had previously “loaned” to Ms. Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como) to Louis Vuitton.
This generous curiosity is at the heart of the Dover Street Market in London, a retail project that Mr. Joffe has nurtured since it opened in 2004.
“But she leads completely — she is the main engine, the pillar of what the company is,” says Mr. Joffe, who is the CEO of Comme des Garçons International. “Her level of control has not ceded one iota in 40 years.”
At Dover Street, the various Comme lines, from menswear to Tricot and Shirt, are sold along with other creative brands across six floors. Some designers, like Azzedine Alaïa, are longstanding friends. Other areas showcase labels such as Lanvin or Yves Saint Laurent, whose designer, Stefano Pilati, has done a capsule collection. The effect is of a hive of creativity, including the buzz of the fledgling designers Christopher Kane and Gareth Pugh or the Japanese designer of Undercover, Jun Takahashi, whom Ms. Kawakubo admires.
Then there are the fragrances — another of Mr. Joffe’s babies — which have been built up since 1994, when Comme laid its first perfume out round the swimming pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris as a urine-yellow liquid in plastic bags, soon followed by perfumes with olofactory suggestions of nail polish and burnt rubber.
But, like the rest of the company, this radical chic in perfume has grown into a genuine €3.2 million business (or about $4.7 million in 2008), also with room for others, so that Daphne Guinness, a creative and eccentric beauty, launched her first perfume with Comme last month.
Another fragrance partnership is with the milliner Stephen Jones, who encountered Ms. Kawakubo at the Ankara airport in 1984 when he was 25 years old and on his first visit to Japan. He has been the creator of memorable Comme headgear, from clowns to crowns or the veils of the evocative “Broken Bride” collection in 2005, about which Ms. Kawakubo says: “It wasn’t simply a collection about weddings, although that may have been the first word. By breaking the rules of wedding dresses, by going behind the idea, there was born the further information that marriage is not necessarily happy.”
Mr. Jones is at pains to point out that Ms. Kawakubo has more wit and sense of fun than outsiders imagine, while Ms. Sozzani, recalling days hanging out with the designer in Tokyo, says: “She’s much easier than she looks. She has a lot of humor you don’t expect.”
Yet “intellectual” (translated in fashion terms as solemn and inscrutable) is the word most often associated with Ms. Kawakubo. It is used in spite of the popular success of her collection for the fast fashion chain H&M last year; it ignores rock ’n’ roll, plaid and punk on her runways; and it disregards her playful take on the bubble-gum pink “Kawaii” world of Japanese girls. (She dismisses it as not some deep culture but “just part of small movement of young girls taking the easy route and dressing like everyone else.”)
Ms. Kawakubo describes her creative process as coming from the single word that is later transmitted by Mr. Joffe at her Paris shows, or occasionally stated with whisper-quiet solemnity by the designer backstage.
“I start every collection with one word,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I can never remember where this one word came from. I never start a collection with some historical, social, cultural or any other concrete reference or memory. After I find the word, I then do not develop it in any logical way. I deliberately avoid any order to the thought process after finding the word and instead think about the opposite of the word, or something different to it, or behind it.”
But instinct and feeling still play a large part.
“The technique is intellectual because I am using my brain, but the result is shaped through instinct and emotion,” Ms. Kawakubo says.
Emotion is the element that fuels the designer’s work, so that her early, deliberately-distressed fabrics exuded a desolate beauty and the faded formality of men’s tailoring tremored to the title of “Lost Englishman.” Even the current autumn 2009 collection expressed a raw emotion of love and loss in blankets and veils. And at Dover Street, colorful straw bags from Ghana, Morocco, Sicily or Thailand each contain a crumpled picture of the person who wove it.
Although “feeling” has also been intrinsic to the work of avant-garde peers like Martin Margiela or Yohji Yamamoto, nowhere has there been such a sense of emotional struggle as in Comme’s “Lumps and Bumps” collection of 1997. Those disturbing, tumor-like paddings later shaped the costumes of a modern dance production of Merce Cunningham.
Many accepted truisms of modern fashion, such as collaborations with artists, were jump-started by Comme’s recognition of a Japanese floral artist or an early fashion partnership with the American contemporary artist Richard Prince. But the most impressive feature of Ms. Kawakubo’s work is that it has remained relevant to fashion right through the era of feminism, flash, girly glamour and celebrity culture.
What is the designer’s secret? Maybe it is the curiosity and cultural awareness that are the essence of creativity.
“What is important to me is information (in the journalistic sense of relating news),” Ms. Kawakubo says. “Through my collections, other product projects and through my graphic work, or by collaborating with artists and photographers, I like to tell a story. Without news, nothing is alive. The final result of everything must say something. Information deepens the work.
“So, if anything, I am maybe more of a journalist than an artist!”
Positive Energy: Comme at 40
By SUZY MENKES
LONDON — Comme des Garçons is marking its 40th anniversary by bringing out a guerrilla-style, temporary brand called “Black” that epitomizes the style, the inventiveness and the originality of its founder.
Rei Kawakubo created black as the color of fashion’s rebel yell. She might have pronounced later, in her enigmatic way, that “red is the new black” and made that vivid color — checkered or regal — part of her repertoire.
But the Japanese designer did not just put women in black like a flock of crows flying across the brash 1980s. More significantly she, in the words of the innovative fashion retailer Carla Sozzani, “interpreted a change of mind in women and opened up a whole vision of femininity.”
Ms. Kawakubo, 66, is one of the great fashion forces from the last decades of the 20th century to now. Integral to her success is that she is too original to be pigeonholed — although others may see her as a symbol of feminism, judging her by the chic severity of an unvarnished face under a straight fringe, complex but plain clothes and flat shoes.
In fact, the guiding force of a fashion life that stretches way beyond clothes is an urge to think forward, encapsulated in new projects this month — from the “Black” stores to a collaboration with Vogue Nippon and an exhibition at the Paris store Colette.
Speaking in Japanese, which was translated by her husband and fellow fashion soul Adrian Joffe, Ms. Kawakubo talked about her early years in Tokyo, as she moved from studying ethics and literature to textile advertising to starting her own label — Comme des Garçons, or “like the boys” — in 1969.
“I really felt that I was on my own,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman. I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. 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.”
That struggle might seem to be over, as the first of the 10 worldwide “Black” stores, aiming to introduce “positive energy” in hard times, opened in Tokyo (Paris is due in two weeks), with perennial Comme looks.
Not only has Ms. Kawakubo been publicly recognized as an artist, with many awards, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. She has also built an independent fashion company with a turnover of $180 million in 2008, yet with an international reputation for creativity unsullied by commerce. She has made the headquarters in Tokyo’s Aoyama district a hatching stall for new talent, with three designers — Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara and Ganryu — building their own brands under Comme’s protection.
“It is true to say that I ‘design’ the company, not just clothes,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “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 Garçon’s creation.”
It is a rare designer who can tune a fiercely independent spirit to another fashion register. Yet among the many Comme collaborations are Levis, Lacoste, Fred Perry and Speedo. Ms. Kawakubo even turned over last year a “roaming” Aoyama store (which she had previously “loaned” to Ms. Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como) to Louis Vuitton.
This generous curiosity is at the heart of the Dover Street Market in London, a retail project that Mr. Joffe has nurtured since it opened in 2004.
“But she leads completely — she is the main engine, the pillar of what the company is,” says Mr. Joffe, who is the CEO of Comme des Garçons International. “Her level of control has not ceded one iota in 40 years.”
At Dover Street, the various Comme lines, from menswear to Tricot and Shirt, are sold along with other creative brands across six floors. Some designers, like Azzedine Alaïa, are longstanding friends. Other areas showcase labels such as Lanvin or Yves Saint Laurent, whose designer, Stefano Pilati, has done a capsule collection. The effect is of a hive of creativity, including the buzz of the fledgling designers Christopher Kane and Gareth Pugh or the Japanese designer of Undercover, Jun Takahashi, whom Ms. Kawakubo admires.
Then there are the fragrances — another of Mr. Joffe’s babies — which have been built up since 1994, when Comme laid its first perfume out round the swimming pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris as a urine-yellow liquid in plastic bags, soon followed by perfumes with olofactory suggestions of nail polish and burnt rubber.
But, like the rest of the company, this radical chic in perfume has grown into a genuine €3.2 million business (or about $4.7 million in 2008), also with room for others, so that Daphne Guinness, a creative and eccentric beauty, launched her first perfume with Comme last month.
Another fragrance partnership is with the milliner Stephen Jones, who encountered Ms. Kawakubo at the Ankara airport in 1984 when he was 25 years old and on his first visit to Japan. He has been the creator of memorable Comme headgear, from clowns to crowns or the veils of the evocative “Broken Bride” collection in 2005, about which Ms. Kawakubo says: “It wasn’t simply a collection about weddings, although that may have been the first word. By breaking the rules of wedding dresses, by going behind the idea, there was born the further information that marriage is not necessarily happy.”
Mr. Jones is at pains to point out that Ms. Kawakubo has more wit and sense of fun than outsiders imagine, while Ms. Sozzani, recalling days hanging out with the designer in Tokyo, says: “She’s much easier than she looks. She has a lot of humor you don’t expect.”
Yet “intellectual” (translated in fashion terms as solemn and inscrutable) is the word most often associated with Ms. Kawakubo. It is used in spite of the popular success of her collection for the fast fashion chain H&M last year; it ignores rock ’n’ roll, plaid and punk on her runways; and it disregards her playful take on the bubble-gum pink “Kawaii” world of Japanese girls. (She dismisses it as not some deep culture but “just part of small movement of young girls taking the easy route and dressing like everyone else.”)
Ms. Kawakubo describes her creative process as coming from the single word that is later transmitted by Mr. Joffe at her Paris shows, or occasionally stated with whisper-quiet solemnity by the designer backstage.
“I start every collection with one word,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I can never remember where this one word came from. I never start a collection with some historical, social, cultural or any other concrete reference or memory. After I find the word, I then do not develop it in any logical way. I deliberately avoid any order to the thought process after finding the word and instead think about the opposite of the word, or something different to it, or behind it.”
But instinct and feeling still play a large part.
“The technique is intellectual because I am using my brain, but the result is shaped through instinct and emotion,” Ms. Kawakubo says.
Emotion is the element that fuels the designer’s work, so that her early, deliberately-distressed fabrics exuded a desolate beauty and the faded formality of men’s tailoring tremored to the title of “Lost Englishman.” Even the current autumn 2009 collection expressed a raw emotion of love and loss in blankets and veils. And at Dover Street, colorful straw bags from Ghana, Morocco, Sicily or Thailand each contain a crumpled picture of the person who wove it.
Although “feeling” has also been intrinsic to the work of avant-garde peers like Martin Margiela or Yohji Yamamoto, nowhere has there been such a sense of emotional struggle as in Comme’s “Lumps and Bumps” collection of 1997. Those disturbing, tumor-like paddings later shaped the costumes of a modern dance production of Merce Cunningham.
Many accepted truisms of modern fashion, such as collaborations with artists, were jump-started by Comme’s recognition of a Japanese floral artist or an early fashion partnership with the American contemporary artist Richard Prince. But the most impressive feature of Ms. Kawakubo’s work is that it has remained relevant to fashion right through the era of feminism, flash, girly glamour and celebrity culture.
What is the designer’s secret? Maybe it is the curiosity and cultural awareness that are the essence of creativity.
“What is important to me is information (in the journalistic sense of relating news),” Ms. Kawakubo says. “Through my collections, other product projects and through my graphic work, or by collaborating with artists and photographers, I like to tell a story. Without news, nothing is alive. The final result of everything must say something. Information deepens the work.
“So, if anything, I am maybe more of a journalist than an artist!”
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