Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo has never explained herself and has no intention of starting. Since founding Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969, she has operated on the principle that fashion should provoke before it pleases. Her 1981 Paris debut — alongside Yohji Yamamoto — was greeted with the kind of hostility reserved for genuine ruptures. Critics called the clothes “post-atomic” and “Hiroshima chic,” missing entirely that Kawakubo was not referencing destruction but proposing an alternative aesthetic vocabulary. The asymmetric silhouettes, the monochromatic palette, the deliberate holes and unfinished hems were not nihilism. They were freedom.

What distinguishes Kawakubo from nearly every other designer working at the highest level is her refusal to repeat herself. Each Comme des Garçons collection begins, by her account, from a place of not knowing. The Spring/Summer 1997 “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” collection — the so-called Lumps collection — distorted the silhouette with padded protrusions that made garments appear to have tumors or pregnancies. It was grotesque and it was beautiful and it asked a question no one else in fashion was asking: what happens when the body itself becomes unfamiliar? The Met’s 2017 retrospective, “Art of the In-Between,” made her only the second living designer — after Yves Saint Laurent — to receive a solo Costume Institute exhibition. She reportedly disliked the framing.

Her influence is structural, not stylistic. Martin Margiela’s deconstruction, Junya Watanabe’s technicality, Raf Simons’s early conceptualism — all of these carry Kawakubo’s DNA. Comme des Garçons the company has also functioned as a kind of incubator, with the Dover Street Market retail concept and the diffusion lines providing platforms for designers who share her belief that clothing is a medium for ideas. At eighty, she continues to show in Paris, and the collections continue to confound. She would not want it any other way.