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Comme des Garcons

Two words best describe the sensibilities of COMME des GARÇONS' Rei Kawakubo: Radical and original. Here is a pioneering spirit that leads rather than follows. In 1981, alongside fellow Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, Kawakubo was invited to show at the official fashion week calendar in Paris, then the epicentre of bourgeois chic offered by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Christian Dior. The city of light wasn’t so much as thrilled than horrified by Kawakubo’s hard-edged, solemn and monochromatic vision. (She single-handedly invented black as the new black, spawning copies like Gremlins upon contact with water.) Hard-pressed to come up with an apt label, critics called that seminal collection, “Hiroshima Chic”. The rest, as they don’t normally say, became the future of modern 20th century fashion. “I want to create something new. I want to suggest to people different aesthetics and values. I want to question their being,” Kawakubo once said. And it is this experimental yearning that has informed her collections, many of which weren’t so much as envelope-pushing as dispensing with the envelope altogether. (Kawakubo is like the Christopher Columbus of fashion: She discovers the unknown, the uncharted, the new.) So influential is the philosophy behind COMME des GARÇONS that, it’s been observed, in every designer, there’s always a little hint of Rei. (Donna Karan, the late Alexander McQueen and Jil Sander have all cited at one time Kawakubo as the world’s most gifted and inspirational designer.) Currently, there are nine in-house product lines, including COMME des GARÇONS’ main line collections for men and women, eveningwear, shirt lines, furniture and fragrance, making Kawakubo one of the fashion scene’s most prolific designers. Comme des Garçons, Erawan Bangkok 2nd Floor, #01-02, tel +662 250 7791.

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Comme des Garcons AW10

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