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Anti-fashion designer
Comme des Garcons’ designer, Rei Kawakubo, has built a thriving international business with clothes that are provocative and often at odds with prevailing trends. REENA GURBAKSH speaks to Adrian Joffe – the designer’s husband and company’s managing director – to find out what drives the designer’s sense of style.
Rei Kawakubo has refused to accept stereotypes in fashion.
AMONG the plethora of international labels that biannually produce fashion according to what’s written in the stars, Comme des Garcons stands out simply because it doesn't give a glossy toss about fitting into the conventional world of style.
To understand why this is, one just has to look beyond the clothes to the label’s designer, Rei Kawakubo, the mastermind behind the label's non-conformist clothes. Although she has been designing collections for over 20 years, Kawakubo happily remains a nemesis to the system and, as a result, has often been labelled “anti-fashion” and her work, unprecedented and difficult to categorise.
Here’s a quick run-through of some of her work: When she first showed her range in Paris in 1982, her austere, almost monastic, clothes were so different from the colourful creations of the time that her style was dubbed “Hiroshima chic”. She also introduced the now familiar and much imitated “unfinished” look with ripped clothes and exposed seams on wool suits and squarely declared that “what’s inside is more important than the outside”.
She also shocked the world with her infamous “dress meets body meets dress” collection where she inserted bumps of various sizes into the seams of clothes and also created ensembles with limpid sleeves dangling from the torso.
Her newest 2004 collection sees jackets with leg-of-mutton sleeves and feather plumes on skirts that give a sense of black magic.
A silk chiffon and organdie outfit from 1989.
One would imagine that such curious creations would leave her open to ridicule, but instead, Comme des Garcons collections fly off the shelves and the label has a near cult-like following across the world. It has 280 stores in Japan, one each in Paris, New York and London, as well as 300 other sales points around the world that raked in US$130mil (RM494mil) last year.
Adrian Joffe, a mellow Englishman who is managing director and chairman of the company in Paris and husband to the 62-year-old Japanese designer, says their formula for success has been simple.
“When everybody wants to wear the same thing, it is the beginning of the end,” he says matter-of-factly in a recent interview in Kuala Lumpur. “What Comme des Garcons stands for is creativity, and because Rei (Kawakubo) had no training in fashion, she makes clothes that she thinks are more interesting and that didn’t exist before.”
Kawakubo – who studied philosophy and then worked as a freelance stylist in the 1960s before establishing her fashion house in Tokyo in 1973 – has said that fashion is a medium that she does not necessarily enjoy.
Writer Deyan Sudjic tells in the book Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garcons how Kawakubo left a job in a chemical company to become a freelance stylist. Kawakubo couldn't find the right sort of clothes for her clients so she started designing her own, and by 1969, she was using the Comme des Garcons – which means “like the boys'' in French – label for them.
Why did she pick such a French-sounding name?
Sudjic says that in the late 1960s, Japanese cities were littered with foreign words used as brand names for a variety of products, so there was nothing unusual about Kawakubo's choice. Also, the designer liked the sound the words made, and the starkness of her clothes seemed to match the meaning perfectly.
Adrian Joffe, the company's managing director and Kawakubo's husband, has done much to soften the maverick woman behind the label.
Her single mindedness in developing a distinctive identity saw her business grow rapidly, first in Japan and then in Europe.
However, to her, mass adulation, like that sought by other successful labels, is unimportant: What she asks of her fans is to appreciate her clothes as a “strong expression of beauty”.
“Commercial success is important but it is secondary. She never does anything just for its commercial value,” Joffe says. “She wants no preconceived notions about her designs – they can mean whatever you like.”
According to him, Kawakubo designs for people who “are exactly like her – those who don’t like rules and believe in freedom of expression.”
“The most important thing to her is to be free – she’d rather die than be answerable to a board of directors. The people who wear Comme share those values and are strong people with a sense of independence. They can be 15 or 75, but we find a lot of artistic and media people love the label.”
Everything about Comme des Garcons personifies this sense of liberation, be it its edgy advertising, its anti-perfumes (see boxed story on previous page) or the off-the-wall charm of its minimalist stores.
“Its not just the clothes ... the entire company goes by the same image,” explains Joffe.
And that goes for the maverick designer too: Kawakubo is mysterious, seldom speaks to journalists, and strictly refuses to answer private questions. Joffe, on the other hand, is affable and open – and journalists love him because after they married in 1992 and he became her preferred spokesman, there have been a lot more insights into his wife’s creative genius!
Comme des Garcons' famous androgynous look.
“She thinks fashion has become too superficial and there are some people who wear her clothes that she’d rather didn’t,” he laughs. “There was a point when it was all about what label you wore and there was a terrible imposition of the conglomerates. But nowthere is a place for people like us.”
With a little prodding, he even divulges a little about their love story: He was a linguist with a degree in Japanese and the Tibetan language and spent three years in Japan. His sister became a designer and he organised a licence deal for her in Tokyo, and it was around that time he began noticing Comme des Garcons’ booming business.
In 1987, he was offered a job with Comme in Paris. In 1991, he left that job to join Club Med, but “I didn’t really want to go and Rei wanted me to stay”. He came back the next year and they were married and from then on, it’s been a successful partnership in more ways than one.
The industry claims that he has done much to tame the austere woman behind the enigmatic label. What does he say? Joffe laughs out loud: “Compromise is not a word she understands. She is a control freak in a lot of ways, but once she has confidence in someone, she leaves it up to the person.”
In the next breath he adds: “And people have the wrong idea about her, she’s not hard at all – she’s a gentle soul who loves old trees and cats and dogs ... and big fat diamonds!”
A selection of Comme des Garcons menswear is available at Philosophy Men, Level 1, Suria KLCC.
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