Begun as a personal artistic endeavor by Rei Kawakubo in the late 1960s and established as a company in 1973, Comme des Garçons found success in Japan in the 1970s, with a menswear line added in 1978. A decade later the company had a debut show in Paris Fashion Week, where Kawakubo's heavy use of black distressed fabrics, and unfinished seams were striking for their originality and going against the then seamless, refined grain. Throughout the 1980s, Comme des Garçons were often associated with a distressed and punk-oriented style, and an all-black aesthetic, earning its followers the term "crow tribe". An image which stood out boldly against the current zeitgeist of the 1980s, as they were seen in high contrast to daily, leisure, and business colors and dress demeanors in the urban environments of Japan. Pattermaker Junya Watanabe almost instantly began to ascend within the work of the fashion house, in the late 1980s he was promoted to chief designer of women's Tricot knitwear, and then moved on to design for the Comme Des Garçons Homme line. Now featuring his own diffusion line, Junya Watanabe Man, he is most known for his streetwear-influencing and groundbreaking "techno-couture" work of the late 1990s and earliest 2000s. This year their work, presented in "The Met’s Rei Kawakubo Show, Dressed for Defiance", is on exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times Sunday Magazine feature and interview, "Rei Kawakubo Revealed (Sort Of)" focuses on the four decades of Comme des Garçons' creation of subversive, gender-bending clothes for men, begun at a time when no one else, in Japan or otherwise, were endeavoring to do so.
Host and interviewer Alice Gregory attends the staff-only show of this season's work as her point of entry; "The models themselves seemed beside the point, redundant. With their tulle-stuffed skirts and plastic-wrapped heads, they looked like characters sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll. And yet, as hard as I tried to force myself to pay attention to them, I was continually distracted by the dozens of employees sitting across from me, each dressed in head-to-toe Comme des Garçons - a band of ideologues in wait. Most had bangs and wore no jewelry. There were ruffled jackets made of washed wool, Arcimboldo-printed gowns accessorized with allergy masks. The skirts were long and layered, the ankle socks plentiful, the shoes flat, the Peter Pan collars oversize. They mixed seasons and lines (there are 18 under the Comme des Garçons label) to dizzying effect; some men wore women’s clothes, some women wore men’s clothes. It was like being in the middle of “Art of the In-Between,” the Rei Kawakubo retrospective mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art - but more urgent and immersive, as though the archive of her work had come to life. Even the most oddly dressed woman is seldom doing anything all that transgressive with her appearance. We assume that women care about how they look, even when they don’t want to look pretty, so when they don kooky hats or outsize suits or shave their heads or apply rouge with purposefully grotesque abandon, it’s taken to be merely an outlandish variation on expected behavior. Meanwhile, an eccentrically dressed man - not a dandy in the Beau Brummell mold but someone plainly interested in creating new and jarring shapes with his body and clothes - is a rare and electrifying sight. In refusing to telegraph the traditional goals of male fashion (power, utility, wealth), it can seem as though he has renounced capitalism itself - even if the price of doing so is equal to a series of consecutive mortgage payments."
"When I met Kawakubo, this is what I wanted to talk to her about: her approach to making clothing for men, whether or not she had thoughts about the state of masculinity in 2017, how designing men’s wear is different (or similar) to creating women’s wear. I wondered if perhaps the tighter constraints of masculine dress codes allowed, in fact, for more creativity and fun. I didn’t expect real answers. Kawakubo is notorious for her gnomic pronouncements (e.g., “The void is important”) and her anachronistic, otherworldly embodiment of what it means to be a genius. Once, in response to a journalist’s question, Kawakubo drew a circle on a piece of paper and walked away. To my surprise, I did not find the designer particularly aloof or monastic in her bearing. Flanked by her husband and translator, Adrian Joffe, who is also the company’s president, Kawakubo projected a kind of plain and quiet professionalism, though the topic of masculine versus feminine wares appeared to agitate her. “Men seem to have more courage to try new things now, not only in Japan but all over the world,” she said, wondering aloud why women have become “so quiet,” and why, these days, it’s the men who buy and wear the showpieces. Women, comparatively, have become more conservative. “It’s a bit upsetting,” she said. “If you have an insight into that, it might help with my business.” It’s true that while there are certainly women who consider themselves dedicated fans of Comme des Garçons (in the early days, they were known in Tokyo as “the crows,” since Kawakubo and her followers were so devoted to the color black), the company seems to hold an even more special place in the hearts of men."
"Though Kawakubo described Comme des Garçons’ male clientele as comprising students and men with creative jobs - “Anyone who is not free in his work probably is not wearing our clothes” - she admitted that the so-called rules of men’s wear (subdued colors, suiting materials, professional silhouettes) make designing for men more interesting, especially as someone with a self-imposed edict to always be creating new, never-before-seen garments. “The basics of clothing lie in men’s fashion,” she has said. The male ardor for Comme des Garçons is, at least in part, a kind of gratitude for a gender-fluid approach to fashion design that has gone mainstream in recent years but was practiced by Kawakubo, virtually alone, for decades. She shrank suit jackets to Chanel topper proportions, made handsome (no other word for it) skirts out of gabardine and tacked schoolgirl collars on otherwise office-ready white button-downs. She gave men a way of opting out of society while still remaining in it. For nearly a century, there had been little to no innovation in men’s wear - a steady, conservative beat of sensible, timeless clothing. Then suddenly, Kawakubo appeared like a sorceress, materializing a new and more permissive way of appearing in the world that changed not only fashion but, on a small scale, maleness itself. Now, 40 years after she began designing men’s wear, her philosophical heirs - Thom Browne, Raf Simons, Craig Green, to name a few - are everywhere. This, finally, is their time."
