35 REI KAWAKUBO (1942–)
Of the Japanese designers who made a worldwide impact in the 1970s and 1980s, Rei Kawakubo has perhaps strayed furthest from the pure, strict vision of the fi rst collections she brought to Paris in 1981.
It is possible that nothing so sensational had hap-pened in fashion in Paris since Christian Dior had unveiled his New Look and the press, in shock, did running mental readjustments on their senses of proportion, propriety and aesthetics. In 1947 they re-embraced their inner fertility goddess; in 1981 they were forced to reassess the provenance of female sensuality and sexual attraction. Traditional Western fashion has generally (but not exclusively) situated them in the body. Rei Kawakubo insisted that they were, in fact, located in the brain. She told Nicholas Coleridge in 1988, ‘The goal for all women should be to make her own living and to support herself, to be self-suffi cient. That is the philoso-phy of her clothes. They are working for modern women, women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their fi gures, but who attract them with their minds.’
This dream of anonymous self-suffi ciency had, said Kawakubo, been her beacon since childhood.
Small and self-effacingly modest, Kawakubo is in-tensely work-focused, perhaps even slightly mas-ochistic in her passion for doing things the hard way.
‘It’s boring if things are accomplished too easily, right?’ she insisted to Leonard Koren in 1984. ‘When I work I think about the excitement of achievement after hard effort and pain.’ In terms of her approach, Deyan Sudjic identifi es her as a modernist (she ad-mires Le Corbusier) but Harold Koda pointed out in his text for the 1987 Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) exhibition, Three Women, that Japan’s
1,000-year-old philosophy of aesthetics encompasses irregularity, imperfection and asymmetry as remind-ers of the fragility and transience of beauty. And Kawakubo was a student of philosophy. It is pos-sible to identify postmodernism in her approach, too, in that she frequently deconstructs—literally and conceptually—and questions the clichés and familiar elements of Western and oriental clothing and makes us think. Not that she has any didac-tic purpose; she is on an exploration of her own which is to do with the relationship of clothes to the body and the body to clothes, of how sexuality is expressed or not in clothes and how something en-tirely new may be made within the challenging limits of what it is possible to make and wear.
Unlike the other designers who changed both fash-ion in Japan and the world’s perceptfash-ion of Japanese fashion, Rei Kawakubo had no formal training. Born in Tokyo in 1942, the daughter of a professor at Keio University, a respected private institution, she started school in a defeated, occupied country and was part of the fl owering of talent prompted by the post-war economic boom and the gradually wid-ened horizons that came with it. She studied both Japanese and Western art at her father’s university and, on graduating in 1964, went to work in the ad-vertising department of Asahi Kasei, a major chemi-cal company which was Japan’s biggest producer of acrylic fi bres. In producing promotional material for print and television advertising intended to give acrylic a fashionable image, Kawakubo became a stylist, one of Japan’s fi rst. Three years later, alien-ated by the paternalism traditional within Japanese companies, she became the fi rst freelance stylist.
However, gradually she became aware that styling
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would not satisfy her urge to stretch her imagination for very long. She had invented the Comme des Gar-çons label (because she liked the way it sounded) for the clothes she designed and made for the ad-vertisements she styled and by 1973 she had es-tablished a company and began to make clothes for sale. ‘It wasn’t a major decision,’ she said. ‘Working as a stylist my responsibility was very small com-pared with that of the art director and the photogra-pher. I became frustrated with what I was doing and wanted to do more.’ She does not regret her lack of formal training. ‘If you can afford to take the time to train your eye and develop a sense of aesthetics in a natural way, it has a lot to recommend it.’
If Comme des Garçons had a certain ring to it, it also seemed appropriate for the simplicity of the clothes she was making, clothes which took a masculine wardrobe as a distant starting point. Interviewed by Geraldine Ranson of the Sunday Telegraph in 1983, she said, ‘Most men don’t like women who are ca-pable of working hard. They do not like strong inde-pendent women with their feet on the ground.’ She did not expect men outside the fashion industry to understand her clothes. ‘It’s not cute or soft and it doesn’t fi t a man’s image of a woman.’ But then, as she had told Mary Russell of Vogue in 1982, ‘I do not fi nd clothes that reveal the body sexy.’
In 1975 Kawakubo showed her fi rst womenswear collection in Tokyo and began her collaboration with the architect Takao Kawasaki to develop a very particular identity for her shops. She also produced the fi rst of a series of catalogues which enabled her to disseminate images of her clothes styled as she wished them to be seen. ‘I try to refl ect my ap-proach not just in the clothes, but in the accesso-ries, the shows, the shops, even in my offi ce. You have to see it as a total impression and not just look at the exposed seams and black.’
In 1978 she launched Homme, her menswear collection; it was followed by Tricot and Robe de Chambre in 1981 and Noir in 1987. The biggest step, however, was in 1981 when, in order to gain recognition internationally, she took her collection to show at the Intercontinental Hotel Paris—to mixed reviews, some bewildered, some dismissive. How-ever, both she and Yohji Yamamoto (the pair had been lovers) were invited to present a catwalk show
the following season, the fi rst time the Chambre Syndicale had ever extended such an invitation to foreign designers. Kawakubo showed an asymmet-ric monochrome collection which included trousers with sweater cuffs at the ankles topped with hybrid tunic/shawls, voluminous overcoats buttoned left to right comme des garçons and boiled-wool knits with the neck hole cut into the chest or the shoulder so that, on the body, the garments made gauche but intriguingly eccentric, abstract shapes. There was no music, just a noise like a train clanging over points, and the models, their make-up dark, hungry-looking and out-of-synch with the features of their impassive faces, moved sedately, joylessly.
These clothes were at fi rst sight puritanically austere and intellectual. Fashion was going through a stale patch, repeating itself, and the only hope for reju-venation appeared to be young London. However, those who were there on that evening will never forget the shock and the delight. Shock because no one had made clothes like this before; and de-light because although they appeared to espouse a deliberately ugly anti-aesthetic, they were strangely compelling and demanded that one did more than react with the senses; they insisted that you think about them. In 1984 Leonard Koren described Kawakubo as having the purest, most uncompro-mising and strongest avant-garde vision of all the designers to come to prominence in the 1970s.
From the 1990s onwards, you are much more likely to fi nd hand-painted crinoline ball gowns than dark, torn shrouds in her collections. In 1983, however, she gravely told Geraldine Ranson that her taste for working exclusively in black and white had re-mained unchanged for ten years or so.
In the early days of a palette of various shades of black, she wryly acknowledged the inherent weak-ness of her method. ‘I realised clothes have to be worn and sold to a certain number of people. That’s the difference between being a painter or sculptor and a clothing designer. It is, in a sense, a very commercial fi eld. Unfortunately my collections tend to be very concentrated and focused on very few ideas and this is a commercial problem. I try to get more variety. But I can’t; it’s not my way.’
Fortunately it has become her way. Each collection is indeed focused but Kawakubo is an instinctive
REI KAWAKUBO
innovator, constantly challenging her own ingenu-ity. Having worked through her initial preoccupa-tion with the structure of clothes, she turned her attention to surface and colour. The creation of her collections depends very much on a series of col-laborations with key creatives. She has famously said that with every collection, ‘I start from zero.’
Hiroshi Matsushita of the Orimono Kenkyu Sha textile company was an early contributor, develop-ing fabrics in response to Kawakubo’s questions, suggestions, thoughts and moods. Deyan Sudjic wrote in 1990, ‘It was Matsushita, for example, who devised the rayon criss-crossed with elastic that allowed Kawakubo to make the garments in the women’s collection of 1984 bubble and boil as though they were melting. And it was Matsushita who formulated the bonded cotton rayon and poly-urethane fabric Kawakubo used for her asymmetric dresses of 1986.’
Her method of work is often more about whim and mischief than any straining after pre-imagined ef-fects. She told Leonard Koren, ‘The machines that make fabric are more and more making uniform, fl awless textures. I like it when something is off, not perfect. Hand weaving is the best way to achieve this. Since this isn’t always possible, we loosen a screw of the machines here and there so they can’t do exactly what they’re supposed to do.’
The fabric is a continuous journey of experiment because, as Matsushita told Sudjic, ‘She never likes to do anything twice, so to meet her require-ments the mills have had to come up with tech-niques that have not been tried before; they have had to invent new fabrics. Lately the words she uses [as her starting point] have been softer, a little sweeter. Maybe she has mellowed; it’s refl ected in the language and in the fabrics.’
With the fabric in place, Kawakubo then works with her large team of pattern-cutters. ‘Some designers,’
she told Sudjic. ‘produce detailed sketches and have a pattern made that is based directly on them.
I begin with a much more abstract drawing and the pattern-makers need to be able to interpret what I am trying to do. They help me to design.’
In 1996 she showed for spring/summer 1997 a col-lection which perplexed even her most die-hard
admirers. Known to Kawakubo as ‘Dress Becomes Body Becomes Dress,’ and to everyone else as the collection of the humps, it distorted skinny, body-hugging clothes in bright spring colours with a se-ries of protuberances that appeared to be attached like some alien limpet-like succubus to random spots around the body, occasionally growing elon-gated and tyre-like to embrace the waist or hips.
There were also waxed brown-paper puffball skirts and fantastically rosette-pleated tops and jackets in Prince-of-Wales check and pretty, girlish ging-ham. An uncomfortable crowd shuffl ed out mutter-ing about the Quasimodo Collection and what do you call the particular political incorrectness that mocks deformity? The collection sold, the clothes were great talking pieces and then great collector’s pieces and Kawakubo continued to experiment, her reputation undamaged.
In 1995 she said, ‘I don’t think my clothes have changed enormously over the years, though I hope I always change in the sense of making progress.
In the past perhaps I was more obvious about ex-posing construction techniques. I used patterns that were very complex; I found that a passion.
Now I am more interested in the general mood of a collection.’ Observers and collaborators do keep refl ecting that they think she has ‘mellowed’ over the years and her marriage to Adrian Joffé, a South African–born architect who is managing director of her company, may have something to do with that.
If the mood of those earlier collections was som-bre and aggressive in its confrontation of the fash-ion world’s expectatfash-ions, the mood of her mature years is much more light-hearted with a strong bias towards Western shapes. But they are shapes transformed by Kawakubo’s unique sense of ar-chitecture, her intellectual distancing from her me-dium and, the factor it was so easy to miss at the beginning, a playful sensuality which lies in tactility and abstract form, a garment’s movement on the body whether it fl ows or, stiff and static, merely changes in silhouette as the wearer turns and moves.
Further reading : Deyan Sudjic’s monograph, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons (1990), is a must-read.