Rei Kawakubo: The Woman Who Turned “Ugly” Into a New Language of Fashion

Rei Kawakubo: The Woman Who Turned “Ugly” Into a New Language of Fashion

Rei Kawakubo did not enter fashion through any of its traditional doors. She never attended fashion school, never apprenticed in a famous Parisian atelier, and never built her reputation by designing clothes that were easy to understand.

Instead, she studied literature and aesthetics at Keio University, worked in advertising for a textile company, became a freelance stylist, and eventually began creating clothes because she could not find the things she wanted to wear.

In 1969, she began selling designs under the name Comme des Garçons. Four years later, she formally established the company.

Then, in 1981, Kawakubo arrived in Paris.

Fashion had spent decades teaching women that clothes should flatter the body. Waists should be defined. Legs should appear longer. Fabric should fall correctly. Luxury should look polished, expensive and finished.

Kawakubo questioned almost every one of those assumptions.

She presented black wool, asymmetric silhouettes, oversized coats, unfinished edges, distressed surfaces and garments that sometimes appeared torn or incomplete. Critics struggled to describe what they were seeing. Some resorted to expressions such as “Hiroshima chic,” a description Kawakubo rejected as a misunderstanding of her work.

She was not interested in making destruction fashionable.

She was interested in asking why fashion had such rigid ideas about beauty in the first place.

Rei Kawakubo's Early Life and the Making of an Outsider

Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942, during the final years of the Second World War. She grew up in postwar Japan at a moment of enormous social, economic and cultural transformation.

Later, Western critics would repeatedly connect her dark colors and distressed garments to images of wartime destruction.

It was an interpretation Kawakubo resisted.

Although she acknowledged remembering the poverty and devastation of postwar Japan, she rejected the idea that her clothes were literal representations of Hiroshima, war or destruction. Her creative process was far more personal and abstract.