Black Comme Des Garcons

[runner]

one pic from infas

 

[Scott]

oh i like the looks of that! is the concept all black?

 

[runner]

yes black is part of the concept.
and there seem to be a few more things included, like rather reasonably priced, for younger generation, all made in japan, etc.

 

[luckyme]

New York Times article this week:

It all starts with One Word....B)

Comme des Garçons Marks 40 Years


By SUZY MENKES
Published: June 8, 2009



LONDON — Comme des Garçons is marking its 40th anniversary by bringing out a guerrilla-style, temporary brand called “Black” that epitomizes the style, the inventiveness and the originality of its founder.
Rei Kawakubo created black as the color of fashion’s rebel yell. She might have pronounced later, in her enigmatic way, that “red is the new black” and made that vivid color — checkered or regal — part of her repertoire.
But the Japanese designer did not just put women in black like a flock of crows flying across the brash 1980s. More significantly she, in the words of the innovative fashion retailer Carla Sozzani, “interpreted a change of mind in women and opened up a whole vision of femininity.”


Ms. Kawakubo, 66, is one of the great fashion forces from the last decades of the 20th century to now. Integral to her success is that she is too original to be pigeonholed — although others may see her as a symbol of feminism, judging her by the chic severity of an unvarnished face under a straight fringe, complex but plain clothes and flat shoes.


In fact, the guiding force of a fashion life that stretches way beyond clothes is an urge to think forward, encapsulated in new projects this month — from the “Black” stores to a collaboration with Vogue Nippon and an exhibition at the Paris store Colette.


Speaking in Japanese, which was translated by her husband and fellow fashion soul Adrian Joffe, Ms. Kawakubo talked about her early years in Tokyo, as she moved from studying ethics and literature to textile advertising to starting her own label — Comme des Garçons, or “like the boys” — in 1969.


“I really felt that I was on my own,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman. I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. I just decided to make a company built around creation, and with creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight.”


That struggle might seem to be over, as the first of the 10 worldwide “Black” stores, aiming to introduce “positive energy” in hard times, opened in Tokyo (Paris is due in two weeks), with perennial Comme looks.


Not only has Ms. Kawakubo been publicly recognized as an artist, with many awards, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. She has also built an independent fashion company with a turnover of $180 million in 2008, yet with an international reputation for creativity unsullied by commerce. She has made the headquarters in Tokyo’s Aoyama district a hatching stall for new talent, with three designers — Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara and Ganryu — building their own brands under Comme’s protection.


“It is true to say that I ‘design’ the company, not just clothes,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “Creation does not end with just the clothes. New interesting business ideas, revolutionary retail strategies, unexpected collaborations, nurturing of in-house talent, all are examples of Comme des Garçon’s creation.”


It is a rare designer who can tune a fiercely independent spirit to another fashion register. Yet among the many Comme collaborations are Levis, Lacoste, Fred Perry and Speedo. Ms. Kawakubo even turned over last year a “roaming” Aoyama store (which she had previously “loaned” to Ms. Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como) to Louis Vuitton.


This generous curiosity is at the heart of the Dover Street Market in London, a retail project that Mr. Joffe has nurtured since it opened in 2004.
“But she leads completely — she is the main engine, the pillar of what the company is,” says Mr. Joffe, who is the CEO of Comme des Garçons International. “Her level of control has not ceded one iota in 40 years.”


At Dover Street, the various Comme lines, from menswear to Tricot and Shirt, are sold along with other creative brands across six floors. Some designers, like Azzedine Alaïa, are longstanding friends. Other areas showcase labels such as Lanvin or Yves Saint Laurent, whose designer, Stefano Pilati, has done a capsule collection. The effect is of a hive of creativity, including the buzz of the fledgling designers Christopher Kane and Gareth Pugh or the Japanese designer of Undercover, Jun Takahashi, whom Ms. Kawakubo admires.


Then there are the fragrances — another of Mr. Joffe’s babies — which have been built up since 1994, when Comme laid its first perfume out round the swimming pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris as a urine-yellow liquid in plastic bags, soon followed by perfumes with olofactory suggestions of nailpolish and burnt rubber.


But, like the rest of the company, this radical chic in perfume has grown into a genuine €3.2 million business (or about $4.7 million in 2008), also with room for others, so that Daphne Guinness, a creative and eccentric beauty, launched her first perfume with Comme last month.


Another fragrance partnership is with the milliner Stephen Jones, who encountered Ms. Kawakubo at the Ankara airport in 1984 when he was 25 years old and on his first visit to Japan. He has been the creator of memorable Comme headgear, from clowns to crowns or the veils of the evocative “Broken Bride” collection in 2005, about which Ms. Kawakubo says: “It wasn’t simply a collection about weddings, although that may have been the first word. By breaking the rules of wedding dresses, by going behind the idea, there was born the further information that marriage is not necessarily happy.”


Mr. Jones is at pains to point out that Ms. Kawakubo has more wit and sense of fun than outsiders imagine, while Ms. Sozzani, recalling days hanging out with the designer in Tokyo, says: “She’s much easier than she looks. She has a lot of humor you don’t expect.”


Yet “intellectual” (translated in fashion terms as solemn and inscrutable) is the word most often associated with Ms. Kawakubo. It is used in spite of the popular success of her collection for the fast fashion chain H&M last year; it ignores rock ’n’ roll, plaid and punk on her runways; and it disregards her playful take on the bubble-gum pink “Kawaii” world of Japanese girls. (She dismisses it as not some deep culture but “just part of small movement of young girls taking the easy route and dressing like everyone else.”)


Ms. Kawakubo describes her creative process as coming from the single word that is later transmitted by Mr. Joffe at her Paris shows, or occasionally stated with whisper-quiet solemnity by the designer backstage.


“I start every collection with one word,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I can never remember where this one word came from. I never start a collection with some historical, social, cultural or any other concrete reference or memory. After I find the word, I then do not develop it in any logical way. I deliberately avoid any order to the thought process after finding the word and instead think about the opposite of the word, or something different to it, or behind it.”


But instinct and feeling still play a large part.


“The technique is intellectual because I am using my brain, but the result is shaped through instinct and emotion,” Ms. Kawakubo says.


Emotion is the element that fuels the designer’s work, so that her early, deliberately-distressed fabrics exuded a desolate beauty and the faded formality of men’s tailoring tremored to the title of “Lost Englishman.” Even the current autumn 2009 collection expressed a raw emotion of love and loss in blankets and veils. And at Dover Street, colorful straw bags from Ghana, Morocco, Sicily or Thailand each contain a crumpled picture of the person who wove it.


Although “feeling” has also been intrinsic to the work of avant-garde peers like Martin Margiela or Yohji Yamamoto, nowhere has there been such a sense of emotional struggle as in Comme’s “Lumps and Bumps” collection of 1997. Those disturbing, tumor-like paddings later shaped the costumes of a modern dance production of Merce Cunningham.


Many accepted truisms of modern fashion, such as collaborations with artists, were jump-started by Comme’s recognition of a Japanese floral artist or an early fashion partnership with the American contemporary artist Richard Prince. But the most impressive feature of Ms. Kawakubo’s work is that it has remained relevant to fashion right through the era of feminism, flash, girly glamour and celebrity culture.


What is the designer’s secret? Maybe it is the curiosity and cultural awareness that are the essence of creativity.


“What is important to me is information (in the journalistic sense of relating news),” Ms. Kawakubo says. “Through my collections, other product projects and through my graphic work, or by collaborating with artists and photographers, I like to tell a story. Without news, nothing is alive. The final result of everything must say something. Information deepens the work.


“So, if anything, I am maybe more of a journalist than an artist!”

 

[Inaya]

Thanks so much for posting that, lucky. ms. K is always an interesting read.

 

[kiddokiddo]

^indeed, hope to see more soon

 

[Scott]

i agree,i think she's so fascinating as a thinker aside from the obvious.

 

[runner]

mitsukoshi.co.jp

 

[lmelanie]

nice..i like that jacket..

 

[cesarcmma]

SOURCE thepop.com


World Exclusive!

This label is going to be hot, and not only because almost everything comes in at under £200. Comme des Garçons have followed-up on their brilliant H&M collaboration by launching a a new credit crunch busting label they’re calling BLACK. The label will be sold in 11 new stores around the world - every nook and cranny designed by La Grande Dame herself, Rei Kawakubo.

We got our hands on some world exclusive pics of the brand-spanking new Tokyo store. Artworks by Russian artist, Kerim Ragimov. Looks blue-chip! (Or, should that be black-chip.)

Don’t hold out too long to get in on the action here, as Comme des Garcons tell us this line will only be around for a year and a half…

She’s got a little Rei of Light!!!…

 

[rui]

please tell me that there will be menswear within the BLACK collection!!!!

 

[ilaughead]

I love Adrian Joffe's quote in the WWD article (over here, with a couple of pictures)

“Rei said she wanted [Black] to last as long as the recession lasts,” he said. “It’s turning morosity into positivity. We can’t just sit there and cry.”

Out of all of the fashion houses, Comme des Garcons is one of only a few to have made really well done, direct response to the world economy. (None of this behind-closed-doors price lowering and product shifting.) I think this would be my favorite so far, but the YSL "New Vintage" idea is particularly novel, and McQueen's F/W 09 show was at least a dramatic combination of reality and dreams.

 

[xionasy]

OMG!
I want to fly to Tokyo right now and buy everything!
This is to make up for the disappointment of the menswear from the CDG X H&M line

 

[cesarcmma]

source |doverstreetmarket newsletter

 

[Scott]

well you wouldn't have to go that far xionasy...it's available at both the comme des garçons locations in NY and Paris as well of course at,Dover Street Market in london.

it looks cool though. very much a higher-quality extension of what she did for H&M,only in black. but very easy and accessible and quirky as always!!

 

[mr.seena]

what a bull**** line

anyone who knows comme des garcons, knows that these clothes have been done before in another collections. the only thing "black" has done, is taken old patterns and made them in black fabrics. i have seen many of these items at other stores, and it makes no sense for the line to recopy and mark up because of it.

 

[from: sophia]

I like it the jackets are great yes it is a lot like other CDG lines but thats ok with me.

 

[mr.seena]

I like it the jackets are great yes it is a lot like other CDG lines but thats ok with me.

look at this:

from anastasia (http://store.anastasiausa.net/c/ana/10219.html)

from colette.(http://www.colette.fr/#/eshop/article/181990/comme-des-garcons-black/426/)

difference is price and color.

 

[from: sophia]

^ Wow your point has been proven

 

[mikka000]

what's your problem exactly?

a) the comme des garcons black version in those items above is cheaper than the one on sale at anastasia.
b) comme des garcons homme plus evergreen is another line that remakes older designs so CdG black is hardly new idea.
c)it's CdG's 40th anniversary this year. so it seems apt to go back over the old collections and take a trip down memory lane.