Today we celebrate Rei Kawakubo, who turns 84. Her birthday a reminder that she built the most radical career in fashion on a line most designers would never say: “I don’t have a definition of beauty.”
Fashion largely exists to make a body look the way we have all quietly agreed a body should look. Kawakubo has never gone along with that. In 1997 she sent out a collection called Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body: dresses stuffed with padding in all the wrong places, lumps at the shoulder, the belly, the hip, the spine. The press named it the “lumps and bumps” show and accused her of deforming the female body. She had taken the single shape fashion insists a woman should be and added back everything it leaves out.
She refused to explain it. Asked what it meant, the story goes that she sat down, drew one circle in black ink on white paper, and walked off. The clothes were the argument. She was not going to translate them for anyone.
Even the now-iconic brand name is a refusal. “Comme des Garçons” translates to “like boys.” She put women in dark, loose, blunt clothes that were not made to be looked at by men. The black belonged to the same thought: not pretty, not soft, not asking to be looked at.
Kawakubo has rightly changed fashion norms for the better with a design language that is consistently innovative and progressive. She made “wrong” into a kind of beauty that museums now archive, and at 84 she is still in Tokyo, still at it, still explaining nothing.
So on her birthday, take her at her word. She doesn’t have a definition of beauty. She decided long ago that she didn’t need one.
Today we celebrate Rei Kawakubo...
