The diminutive but immensely powerful Japanese designer instils in her collections a very philosophical approach to fashion. In this essay, fashion historian Ángela Hurtado Pimentel dissects Kawakubo’s creative, cultural and philosophical vanguard

 

Few designers can boast of a wide-ranging influence over the whole panorama of fashion, of having questioned the very foundations of our understanding of clothes, of becoming a defining presence in avant-garde fashion, in the way that Rei Kawakubo (and her brand Comme des Garçons) has done since the late sixties.

 

There is no shortage of reasons why Kawakubo should be honoured with a solo exhibition in an art museum, especially if we recognise her talent for presenting clothes as profound questions. Kawakubo has never been interested in a simple representation of feminine glamour or luxury, but rather has forced us to approach her pieces with a mind so open that all our preconceived notions fall away. There’s nothing strictly defined in her collections, no single idea of masculine and feminine, or even of how clothes should be constructed to fit an ideal body. Her designs move in the space left unexplored by the boundaries we place on ordinary clothes.

 

Kawakubo’s insistence in blurring the Western gender limits applies the language of the kimono. The body is wrapped in the kimono and the obi in such a way that it does not reveal or emphasise the feminine silhouette, rather creating an alternative for the tightly fitted styles common in the West. For Kawakubo, this allows for a powerful critique on sexuality: attraction does not necessarily have to come from the revelation of a perfect body. Her designs create distorted silhouettes, impossible bodies that extend and contract, and that can be completely undefined.

 

Several of Kawakubo’s Japanese contemporaries tend to explore the rich visual and philosophical history of their country. Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake can be linked to a similar fashion approach, one which places great value on artisanal craftsmanship. Japan has a rich tradition of handmade textiles and fashion objects, and this history comes hand in hand with an appreciation of the dignity of the artisans themselves. For the Japanese designers working in a field dominated with the Westernised ideal of mass-production, the act of slowing down and creating with an eye on innovation through traditional techniques is especially powerful.

 

A fitting example of this approach is the attention Kawakubo bestows upon the textiles in her collections. She is known for altering the way fabrics are woven in computerised looms, so that they come out warped, torn and imperfect. The difficult birth of her textiles is riddled with accidents, something she encourages and desires. This sets her apart from the mass-produced uniformity so common in fashion, and presents an alternative to perfection. There is also a sense that these imperfections enrich the narrative present in her collections, as a way of incorporating extremely tactile and sometimes even disquieting textures.

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"... the West has a seemingly cultural obsession with balance, symmetry and perfection, one that translates into our way of treating fashion and the bodies that inhabit our clothes"

 

By contrast, the West has a seemingly cultural obsession with balance, symmetry and perfection, one that translates into our way of treating fashion and the bodies that inhabit our clothes. Japan has centred its traditional visual culture on the concept of wabi-sabi, which reflects on imperfection as a source for beauty in the natural world. Kawakubo is a master of the imperfect, with her extraordinary collections invading the almost sterile and perfect world of Western fashion. Her use of destroyed textiles and bizarre proportions, coupled with deconstructed techniques and displaced features, create clothes that can be nearly shocking for the average consumer. It is all rooted on the notion that beauty can manifest in multiple ways and that it can cause a deep commotion to our homogenised view of the ideal.

 

In this way, Kawakubo is set to destroy the canon of Western perfection, of the ideal proportions in a sample body. She works with volume and form in a puzzling scale, contorting the body and obscuring its shape until it becomes ambiguous. Naturally, this approach to fashion design was not always easy to understand, especially since she moved to Paris to produce her collections, with an eye towards gaining international recognition. Even so, she became part of an avant-garde that challenged the way fashion is created in the very centre of “good taste”.

 

Kawakubo’s pieces move in the uneasy space that appears when we separate the world into categories: the male and the female, the self and the other, clothes and not-clothes. She questions the way we set these boundaries, presenting us with objects that are impossible to characterise into dualities. Her pieces are difficult to read, and she assigns them no intrinsic meaning, instead, she works with an “absence of intent”. This forces the public to look for their own interpretations, to have their experiences circulate through these extraordinary objects, so they can arrive at a personal meaning.

 

The work of this contemporary designer is so important because of the necessity to question fashion, which can become profoundly narcissistic. She sways in between fashion and anti-fashion, and uses these interstitial spaces to ask us why objects and bodies have to be perfect, why everything needs a reason, why we separate and categorise, why beauty has only one expression: just why. “I want to suggest to people different aesthetics and values. I want to question their being,” she once said. When was the last time your clothes made you think?

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken on the challenge of looking for an interpretation of Kawakubo’s designs in its forthcoming spring exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In Between. Organised as a thematic exploration of the essential limits that she has breached with her clothes, the display includes around 150 pieces, and will be on view from May 4th until September 4th this year. For tickets and additional information, visit metmuseum.org. 

 

To learn more about the work of Kawakubo and other avant-garde Japanese designers, look for the following titles:

Bonnie English, “Japanese Fashion Designers”

Akiko Fukai and Barbara Vinken, “Future Beauty: 30 years of Japanese Fashion”

 

Ángela Hurtado Pimentel is a fashion historian and lecturer at the Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica. To learn more about her work, visit her Facebook page here.