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The Guardian Interviews Rei

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  • DudleyGray
    Senior Member
    • Jul 2013
    • 1143

    The Guardian Interviews Rei

    Rei Kawakubo’s Radical Chic

    The Japanese designer’s Comme des Garçons collection was dismissed as ‘post atomic’ and her devotees nicknamed ‘crows’, but her singular vision has shaped the way we dress today. Jacques Hyzagi is granted a rare interview with the designer and retail genius.

    Four times a year, the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo flies to Paris from Tokyo to show her men’s and women’s Comme des Garçons collections. In June this year she was in town for men’s fashion week, which was staged in a dilapidated mansion at 7 rue Meyerbeer. She never takes a bow at the finale. In fact she rarely gives interviews and hasn’t been professionally photographed since 2005. While she avoids publicity, she does meet the buyers who come to order from the collection each season. So we meet at the Comme des Garçons showroom at Place Vendôme, where she paces calmly, dressed in her trademark black, while staff in military-inspired garb accessorised with polka-dot shoes buzz around her.

    Eleven mannequins, lined up like Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army, display her most recent Comme des Garçons Homme Plus menswear collection, Broken Tailoring. They are adorned with neon-yellow hairpieces by stylist Julien d’Ys. The clothes include a tailored men’s blazer with a motif of golfers ripped three-quarters of the way down the back and paired with unfitted shorts. There’s a horizontally pinstriped tailored jacket obfuscated with metal buttons, shown with trousers which have one leg shorter than the other. Another pinstriped blazer has a ripped back and elbows so the shirt underneath shows through.

    “The primary objective of this collection is not specifically for kids to wear the clothes as streetwear, but to comment on the current state of menswear, which is easy, casual and based on sports. I see the collection as an addition to the discussion on menswear,” explains Kawakubo, “where tailoring is broken down to add value to it. I want to show people that tailoring has value, which I don’t see any more in men’s fashion.”

    Etc.
    bandcamp | facebook | youtube
  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    #2
    Thanks for posting. I understand Guardian writing an article like that, since their audience is, well, general, but I really wish for something deeper than these "fashion 101" pieces.
    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

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    • DudleyGray
      Senior Member
      • Jul 2013
      • 1143

      #3
      Agreed, I didn't get a chance to read through it until after posting. But Rei interviews are so scarce that I just took it for granted that it would have something new or insightful. Nope, that's another 5 minutes of my life wasted.
      bandcamp | facebook | youtube

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      • stagename
        Senior Member
        • Oct 2011
        • 497

        #4
        Given that business and arts are usually seen as opposed logics, I thought the article was interesting in showing that RK see them as a whole. Now it might as well be all rhetoric. Yet, I found it insightful. Thanks for hte share.

        Comment

        • DudleyGray
          Senior Member
          • Jul 2013
          • 1143

          #5
          She doesn't strike me as the rhetoric type, I would lean towards believing that she means what she says while she's saying it. She always talks about attempting to create new things, and I think her work supports that. And I believe her when she says people falling down makes her laugh. But I can't guess at how she can see art and business as one. I can't see how the Supreme collab was really anything artistic, but I guess that's why she's Rei and I'm me.
          bandcamp | facebook | youtube

          Comment

          • stagename
            Senior Member
            • Oct 2011
            • 497

            #6
            In any case, it would be a fruitful avenue of inquiry. Maybe when I have time in 2017. There was an article on Koon a couple of years back and how he had to devise a new genre of selling process to get the money to make his pieces exactly how he wanted to make them (ie. push his creative process) (he made galleries pay for the piece sin advance), so I believe there is gorunding for hte statement. Currently though, at least in scholarship and how we usually talk about art and commerce, they are opposed, so yeah, interesting

            Comment

            • Faust
              kitsch killer
              • Sep 2006
              • 37852

              #7
              It just goes to show you that I was right when I called Rei the Andy Warhol of fashion a few years ago. I stand by that statement.
              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

              Comment

              • zamb
                Senior Member
                • Nov 2006
                • 5834

                #8
                She and her team are some of the smartest business people in fashion.
                she has somehow managed to build a multi label conglomerate without any one ever really seeing it as such

                With the different labels and Junya, Tao etc its impressive

                coupled with the Dover street markets that sells a ton of other brands.......the Woman and her partners are absolute genius!
                “You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”
                .................................................. .......................


                Zam Barrett Spring 2017 Now in stock

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