Rei Kawakubo is one of the most influential figures in fashion. Her relentless pursuit of the new has made her a source of inspiration for both designers and fans. “I can only lead by being who I am, by looking for something new and working on creating, and by sticking to that unwaveringly,” she says.
The small, intense 82-year-old speaks in Japanese, translated by Adrian Joffe, her husband since 1992 and now president of her brand Comme des Garçons International. Kawakubo usually refuses interview requests, particularly in person, and to be photographed. She will greet members of the press after her fashion shows, but only offers clipped phrases to explain them — “Blue witches”, “18th-century punks”, and perhaps most memorably, for spring/summer 2014, “Not making clothes”.
We meet in Paris, at Comme des Garçons’ showroom on Place Vêndome, directly opposite The Ritz. Kawakubo is dressed in black — a full skirt, a frogged satin jacket — and big white trainers. Our interview takes place two days after her autumn/winter 2025 menswear show and two hours before her flight home to Tokyo, where Comme des Garçons is based.
Japan is not central to Kawakubo’s creativity. Her designs cannot be labelled as “Japanese” and are hard to categorise. Any question about her creative process is rebuffed. “Because there’s no process,” says Joffe. “It’s just her.”
Kawakubo concurs. “What is beautiful is what my eye allows me to be stimulated by. It’s what I feel. It’s very hard to define,” she says. “It’s always changing. That’s the thing. If you had the definition of what is beautiful, I would never be able to find anything. Because often the beauty comes from the unexpected.”
Although elusive, even reclusive, Kawakubo’s unexpected approach to fashion has made her famous. Her Dover Street Market stores, unconventional multi-brand retail environments led by Comme des Garçons, opened in 2004. They are now in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Beijing, Singapore and, of course, Tokyo.
And Comme des Garçons is referenced in popular culture, including songs by Jay-Z and Kanye West; it’s the actual title of a song by Frank Ocean. Perhaps most importantly, she was the subject of a major 2017 retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is only the second living designer ever afforded that honour — the other was Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.
Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942. Her father was an administrator at Keio University and her mother a teacher. Kawakubo studied fine art and literature at that university — she has no formal fashion training.
When she founded Comme des Garçons, in 1969, Kawakubo was working as a freelance stylist, after a period in the advertising department of textile manufacturer Asahi Kasei. She couldn’t find the clothes she wanted to use in her work, so she made them. There was no great urge to create at that point, she says, no pull towards fashion.
“It was just one way of being independent and working and making a living. The fact that it was fashion was coincidental.” So was the name — Comme des Garçons translates as “like boys”, but Kawakubo’s clothes aren’t boyish. It was chosen because she liked how the phrase looked, and she designed the logo herself.
In 1981, Kawakubo showed her clothes in Paris for the first time. She has said that her way of creating changed in about 1979, when she began to look for something more directional, more powerful through her work. She achieved it — from then on, her work represented a series of radical ruptures with traditions of “clothes-making” (her preferred term to fashion design) that rocked the fashion world.
In 1982, she presented a controversial collection of knitted sweaters with ripped holes that she dubbed Lace — its baggy shapes and torn and distressed layers were so different to the fashion around them, it shot her to industry fame.
That continued to rise as her work evolved. In 1996, she showed Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, a collection of stretch dresses distorted by lumps of padding that challenged ideas of attraction. Various collections have dissected dressmaking patterns, shifting garments and their component parts around the body so much that she was once dubbed “The mother of deconstruction”.
She was credited by Harvard Graduate School of Design with “inventing” black, due to how much she used it in her early Paris years — a riposte to the flashy, colourful clothes of western designers in the 1980s. The fashion industry called early disciples of Comme des Garçons “crows”.
Fashion may revere Kawakubo now, but it hasn’t always understood her. Her Lace collection was derided with the xenophobic epithet “Hiroshima chic”. At the silent unveiling of the 1996 collection, colloquially dubbed “Lumps and Bumps”, a catwalk photographer shouted “Quasimodo!” at a model. (Although choreographer Merce Cunningham worked with Kawakubo on similar designs as costumes for his 1997 dance piece “Scenario”.)
What Kawakubo is really interested in, always, is the new. But, over a 56-year career, a search for newness understandably becomes harder. “I rarely find something new or something that I’m looking for through consciousness,” Kawakubo says. “It comes more often than not through instinct. I’ve always felt that you can find new things through coincidence, but you can’t ever consciously look for the coincidence. The point is, whether you notice [it] or not.”
The coincidental is vital in Kawakubo’s work. Those 1982 “lace” sweaters were said to be created by loosening screws in knitting machines, so the instruments couldn’t work properly. I ask if that is true. “I can’t remember if there were actually screws being tampered with,” she says. “But there were needles taken off so they wouldn’t knit.”
There have been other instances, she says. “Especially when we make fabric, things like that. It’s easier to find something new by tampering with the technique. You have to tamper with the normal way of making something to make something new, often to the aghast of the others.”
Is there resistance to her breaking things? “The people I work with are used to this, so they often say they’re not that aghast,” she says. Joffe adds: “People know that she’s always going to come up with something that’s going to bend their brain.”
Kawakubo’s January menswear show, however, required no brain bending — “To hell with war” was her statement. The clothes were tour de forces of tailoring, patching together scraps of military officer’s greatcoats and olive drab, the models’ heads topped with helmets wrapped with brightly coloured fabric or crowned with flowers.
Attempts to interpret Kawakubo bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s remark, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” offers a similar argument — both help explain why Kawakubo generally avoids interviews. She prefers the work to speak for itself.
“She wouldn’t comment on political events,” Joffe says. “For her, there’s nothing else but to continue the work she’s always done.” In that sense, her work is her statement.
A battle feels like a fitting metaphor for Kawakubo, whose work is often linked to the spirit of punk — defined by defiance and challenge. What does punk mean to her? “There are lots of ways of interpreting the basic fundamental tenet of punk,” she says. “The spirit of punk is the resistance to authority and wanting to change established values.”
What as a punk makes her angry? “Things that are constrictive and things that are staid,” she replies. “Complacency, contradiction and unfairness. Prejudice — what often makes me angry is unfairness.”
Yet, Kawakubo allows, “I can’t do business just being a punk.” Business is very important to her. “I’ve got two wagons,” she says, mimicking two diverging paths with her hands — one for business, one for creative. And Comme des Garçons has built a sizeable and healthy business — 2024 figures put global turnover at about $450mn, up from $320mn in 2019.
The business includes the labels Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya, whose respective designers are both former Comme des Garçons pattern-cutters, and a series of young talents supported by a brand-development division called Dover Street Market Paris, as well as various Comme des Garçons lines.
There are a raft of more wearable, everyday commercial clothes to support the extreme looks Kawakubo shows on the catwalk — indeed, she actively dislikes remaking those for clients, given the difficulty in creating them in the first place. But their spirit is ever-present. She even successfully translated her aesthetic to a mass line for H&M, back in 2008.
Her influence can be traced beyond the Comme des Garçons circle. Designers openly cite her as inspiration: Marc Jacobs’ most recent New York show was filled with lumpy, bumpy pieces that owed a distinct debt to Kawakubo. Raw seams and ragged hems that originated on the catwalk with Kawakubo in the 1980s are now standard fashion choices (and she still uses them today).
What enables her to fulfil her role as an industry leader, which she clearly still relishes? She says the word “Buki”.
“Buki, buki — it’s like a weapon,” Joffe translates. “The only weapon she has is the strength and creative power of the things she makes, and by doing that, by keeping her values and carrying on doing that for 56 years is how people look up to her. If she didn’t do that any more, they wouldn’t look up to her.”
I ask if there are designers whose work she feels a connection to. “She doesn’t ever like to name names,” Joffe says. Then, he interprets her response: “Anybody who works creatively, with all their heart.”
One last question. Does Kawakubo ever worry she’ll run out of ideas? She stares at me, then turns to Joffe, enjoining him to translate.
“Every day.”
