“Are you scared of her?” I asked him bluntly over a Wiener schnitzel at the Café Einstein. The Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo is one of fashion's most influential designers — a fact that is about to be cemented by an exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opens to the public on May 4. Kawakubo wasn’t thinking of a fashion career: her only vocation was for a life of self-sufficiency She found a job “at the bottom of the ladder” in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a textile manufacturer. But no one had informed Armani, a couture débutant. Does it really matter what one wears? “Even in those days, she had an aura,” Tanaka says, “and I asked a friend if she knew her name, because I wanted to meet her.”, Sudjic writes, “Kawakubo’s experiences as a stylist had taught her the importance of creating a coherent identity”—a philosophy of design that is followed as strictly in the company’s Christmas cards as it is in the flagship stores. The translation of the label’s name – like boys – is only the most obvious indicator that Comme des Garçons has little use for gender conventions. Kawakubo was never a druggie or a rebel, she says, “though in my head I liked the bohemian life style.” On the other hand, she went to college with “a lot of rich people—that’s who goes to élite institutions, and they are generally conservative.” She found the solidity of their lives appealing, and she considers herself to have a dual character: the right half “likes tradition and history,” the left “wants to break the rules.” Nearly every statement Kawakubo makes about herself is hedged or negated by a contradiction, and she resists being defined even by her own words. Kawakubo is the illusive and ground-breaking founder of fashion brand Comme des Garcons. Malcolm McLaren remembers Kawakubo and Yamamoto as a petite, stylish couple of “excellent customers” (he didn’t yet know they were designers) who, in the seventies, turned up at Sex, the mother of all guerrilla shops, an outpost of seditionary music and fashion that he and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, had opened at World’s End, in London. By exaggerating the female form, hiding the body beneath layers of fabric and ultimately rendering its actual physical attributes all but meaningless, her designs challenge conventional beauty standards and deflect the male gaze. Instead, she examines and dismantles garments, as if trying to capture their essence by the very act of questioning their intended function. Mugler and Versace were the harbingers of a new moment: of a giddy, truculent materialism embodied, in different guises, by Margaret Thatcher, Madonna, Princess Di, Alexis Carrington, and Jane Fonda, and by legions of newly minted executives who wore block-and-tackle power suits to the office and spandex stirrup pants to the gym. “The ideas aren’t as abstract as they used to be.”). Supporting Comme des Garçons financially can, in and of itself, be understood as a feminist fashion statement. From left: spring/summer 1997; fall/winter 2017. “I couldn’t explain it to you. REI KAWAKUBO says finding new inspiration is growing more and more challenging the longer she is in fashion - and she's worried that today's crop of designer talent don't have what it takes to suceed her. Shop assistants showed one the ropes—literally. The ecclesiastic lines of his sculptural couture liberated women from the tyranny of the wasp-waisted New Look, and later from the ruthlessness of the miniskirt. Her boss was sympathetic to her ambitions. "Once I've made something, I don't want to do it again, so the breadth of possibility is becoming smaller.". A new minimalism is here, the fashion bylines say. Ironically, she called it “lace” — and, technically, as a fabric perforated with openings, it was. There are few women who have exerted more influence on the history of modern fashion, and the most obvious, Chanel, is in some respects her perfect foil: the racy courtesan who invented a uniform of irreproachable chic and the gnomic shaman whose anarchic chic is a reproach to uniformity.
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