The Genre-Defying Magic of Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons

The Tokyo Years

A graduate of Keio University with a degree in Fine Art and Literature, Rei Kawakubo launched Comme des Garçons in 1969 with no formal training in fashion design. Experimental from the outset, her designs proved popular with a Japanese customer base, and in 1973 the label was officially incorporated as Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo continued to gradually expand the brand’s domestic operations, opening a Tokyo boutique in 1975 years before stepping foot outside the island nation.

Comme’s Paris Debut

Kawakubo and Comme broke out on the international scene following the designer’s first show at Paris Fashion Week in 1981. Initial reception, however, was not universally positive. The deconstructed, distortive and subversively minimalist style she had honed for the previous decade flew in the face of the ostentatious, maximalist style popular during the ’80s, exemplified by the likes of Thierry Mugler and Gianni Versace.

While other designers explored figure-hugging dresses that accentuated the female form, Kawakubo exploded it with designs that bulged and jutted, concealing the wearer beneath layers of fabric. Nonetheless, Kawakubo’s work had a huge impact on the Paris fashion set and within a decade, designers from the emergent European avant-garde such as Ann Demeulemeester and Martin Margiela began citing Kawakubo and Comme as direct influences on their work.

Kawakubo’s vision carried through to everything the brand touched. Ads popped up in fashion magazines, executed as the antithesis of ’80s glamour. Christy Turlington with teased hair in a geometric dress, photographed by Steven Meisel. Pet Shop Boys lyrics superimposed over a painting by Abraham Mignon. Elephants marching through an urban landscape in an image shot by André Kértesz. In most imagery, the clothing came second. What mattered was communicating to people that Comme des Garçons was more than just a fashion brand—it was an ongoing, evolving idea, one meant to be explored in every medium available.

This line of thinking continued on the runway, casting the era’s most iconoclastic voices to debut Kawakubo’s creations. In 1987, Jean-Michel Basquiat, at the peak of his career, walked for Comme des Garçons Homme Plus’ Spring/Summer 1987 collection. Dennis Hopper followed shortly after, appearing on the runway for the house’s FW91 show. The appearances helped realize Kawakubo’s expansive fantasy, one that could only be fulfilled by outfitting era-defining artists in her era-defining clothing.

Today, this influential period is immortalized in a number of books, from the Comme des Garçons brand book published in 1998 to 2017’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. Collated in the form of tomes, these publications shine a light on just how far ahead Kawakubo was and continues to be—whether in the form of collaborative long-term partners, which includes legendary art director Tsuguya Inoue, or in the form of her many inimitable quotes, which spans everything from “I work in three shades of black” to “I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well.”

Sub and Diffusion Lines

Both the Comme empire and its history resemble a map of the Tokyo Metro more than they do a neat and tidy journey from point A to B. Most of it can be traced back to the ’80s, when many of Commes’ most well-known and enduring lines were established.

Following the original Comme des Garçons line, Kawakubo launched Comme des Garçons Homme in 1978, designed by her then-protegé Junya Watanabe. In 1984, Kawakubo launched Homme Plus, the label’s main menswear line, designed by Kawakubo herself. This was followed by the blacked-out womenswear line Comme des Garçons Noir and formal tailoring line Homme Deux, both in 1987, and the appropriately named shirting line, Commes des Garçons Shirt, in 1988.

In 1993, Kawakubo launched Comme des Garçons, Comme des Garçons (typically abbreviated as CDG CDG), a refined womenswear label intended to showcase Kawakubo’s honed aesthetic in its most pure and unadulterated form. And, finally, in 2008, in response to the global financial crisis, the label launched Comme des Garçons BLACK, intended to offer a more affordable and austere version of the label’s signature blacked-out designs.

Beyond this, there are a plethora of other lines that have moved in and out of sight over the years, including but not limited to Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Sport, Homme Plus Evergreen, Shirt Girl and Shirt Boy. To refer to the Comme network as a family wouldn’t be an exaggeration—laid out in a diagram, the resulting image really does resemble a family tree.

The Joffe Connection and Expansion

As Comme’s star continued to rise, businessman Adrian Joffe, who had been working in Japan, took note of the label’s rapidly exploding popularity. According to Joffe, it was around 1987 that a mutual acquaintance informed him that the company was looking for a Commercial Director. Joffe went for an interview which, as a fluent Japanese speaker, he would also be translating. He got the job and by 1993 he had married Kawakubo and been made president of the company. To this day, he continues to serve as Kawakubo’s translator during the few press interviews she agrees to.

The Comme des Garçons business has always involved a careful balance of commerce and creativity. Hardly out of the ordinary for a fashion enterprise, the tightrope was even trickier for Comme. Kawakubo’s distinctly unorthodox sensibilities, combined with her staunch commitment to Comme as an artistic endeavour meant that traditional tactics fashion labels use to drive up revenue and drive expansion, such as diffusion lines and fragrances, were somewhat anathema to Kawakubo’s approach.

This is where Joffe came in. He operated as the business counterpart to Kawakubo’s creative endeavours but did so with a careful understanding of what those endeavours required: staying faithful to the Comme vision and remaining credible. For instance, Comme would release fragrances but, true to Kawakubo’s deconstructivist style, they would be more like anti-fragrances.

The culmination of the duo’s efforts yielded the brand’s first truly commercial and hugely popular diffusion label, PLAY. Composed almost entirely of simple, accessible silhouettes such as T-shirts, hoodies and sweaters decorated with stripes, polka dots and heart graphics, CDG PLAY offered a slice of high fashion at a comparatively affordable price.

Dover Street Market

In 2004, the Comme des Garçons empire expanded once more with its venture into heavyweight fashion retail. Dover Street Market, named for the Central London street where it was originally located, opened its doors in 2004, once again providing a distinctly Comme take on the traditional luxury department store. 

Where the English capital’s other big-name department stores battled it out over the same brands, ostentatious installations and massive square footage, DSM presented a pared-back, polished concrete interior across a handful of floors, stocking predominantly independent brands, as well as a basement section filled with then-largely-unknown Japanese streetwear labels such as NEIGHBORHOOD, UNDERCOVER and visvim, in addition to Supreme, which wouldn’t open its own London flagship until several years later.

For its first eight years of operations, Dover Street Market remained the only one of its kind, a pilgrimage site for Comme fans and alt-fashion aficionados. From 2012 onward, the business underwent rapid international expansion, opening flagships in Tokyo (2012), New York (2013), Singapore (2017), Beijing (2018), Los Angeles (2018) and Paris (2019). 

In 2016, the original London flagship itself expanded, moving from its original Dover Street location to 18-22 Haymarket, just off Piccadilly Circus, which originally housed the headquarters of the iconic British fashion label Burberry.

The Extended Comme Family

Aside from the extensive roster of Comme diffusion lines listed above, Comme des Garçons is the central star in an entire constellation of breakaway and grandchild labels. Going into extensive detail about each and every label would be a monumental task, but the extent of the network is unmatched by any other fashion house in its strength and organic growth.

Junya Watanabe, one of Kawakubo’s original protegés, was the first to start his own line. His eponymous label was launched in 1992 and is best known for its experimental reimagination of classic workwear silhouettes, overlaying work jackets, jeans and other hard-wearing clothing with brightly colored patchworks and quilt patterns.

Fumito Ganryu’s eponymous Ganryu line is another well-known Comme off-shoot. Launched in 2007 by the former Junya Watanabe patternmaker, the label specializes in presenting archetypal streetwear silhouettes, such as shorts, coach jackets and shirting, with a distinctly CDG twist. The brand shuttered unceremoniously in 2017, but it endures as an emblem of Comme’s longstanding authentic connection to the streetwear world from the old guard of fashion.

Two other notable Comme alumni are husband and wife duo Junichi Abe and Chitose Abe. Both left Comme to launch their own respective labels, kolor and sacai, running each separately. Both have experienced considerable success, with Chitose Abe experiencing a rise to international stardom not dissimilar to Kawakubo’s.

Comme Collaborations

And on top of all this, there are the many collaborations through which Comme has further established its name across every strata of fashion from the highest echelons to the city sidewalks, and which, through their creation, demonstrated the label’s far position ahead of the curve relative to its European contemporaries.

Most notable of the brand’s long history of collaborations include its extensive series of releases with Nike under numerous sublines, as well as collaborations with high-fashion labels, such as Gucci and Louis Vuttion, and accessible fashion companies like H&M. Further demonstrating its position within the cultural landscape, Comme des Garçons and its sublines have teamed up with virtually every streetwear heavyweight under the sun, from KAWS, Stüssy and BAPE to Chrome Hearts, Anti Social Social Club and Supreme. The brand’s ongoing collaborations with Supreme in particular have created some of the most coveted releases in both brands’ histories, taking classic silhouettes and twisting them to produce something utterly unique.

The Magic of Comme

Comme’s ability to move seamlessly from one corner of the clothing world to another without batting an eyelash is unquestionably its greatest strength—but there’s something else to it. By reinterpreting fashion preconceptions via unorthodox aesthetics, accessible sublines and countless collaborations, Comme took the stuffy world of high-end style and imbued it with an effortlessness.

At the same time, Comme has consistently managed to take the most basic items—Converse sneakers, plain white tees, Levi’s jeans—and elevate them to stand proudly alongside the most exclusive couture garments. This is perhaps the most remarkable feat achieved by Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe, a coup they’ve been performing since the ’80s: meticulous sartorial creativity and mass-marketing magic molded into one, without diminishing the power of either.