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Source | NY Times T Style Magazine Sunday Feb 24th
Gang of Four
COMME DES GARÇONS IS AN EXTENSION OF REI KAWAKUBO'S BRAIN. A KIND OF ZEN MASTER, SHE ALLOWS HER PROTÉGÉS TOTAL FREEDOM. AND THAT'S TOUGH.
Peoples’ eyes constantly deceive them, and that was certainly true in Paris in the fall of 1996, when Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind Comme des Garçons, presented a collection of dresses swollen with huge lumps. In profile, the models looked like hunchbacks or camels tipped onto their sides.
There were smaller, kidney-shaped masses on shoulders and arms, most covered in cheerful gingham. The clothes confounded critics, even those used to Kawakubo’s abstract methods. Amy Spindler wrote in The New York Times that Kawakubo had "invented whole new deformities for women.”
During the show, which was conducted in silence, one photographer muttered, "Quasimodo.”
"Lumps and Bumps,” as the collection came to be called, illustrates the difficulties for a designer of being not merely original but also a modernist. Kawakubo said she was interested in exploring "volume and space.” If you begin with the outline made by her shapes (the classic "silhouette”) and then pull back — moving away, as it were, from the confinements of fashion — you realize that Kawakubo has in fact recreated a reality of the late 20th century: the individual seemingly joined to her backpack and her burdens; even the act of talking on a cellphone assumes a spatial connection, producing what appears in the abstract to be a growth. Kawakubo’s objective was not to distort the female body but rather to express a thought that probably, for her, began with a gesture or a glimpse. Some designers, like Alber Elbaz of Lanvin and Azzedine Alaïa, solve problems of dressmaking — putting darts in a skirt to give it softer volume. Kawakubo, working more in the spirit of an artist than any designer today, attacks the problems of consciousness.
Kawakubo has been making clothes for nearly 40 years, always under the label Comme des Garçons, which means "like some boys” and in a way suggests a gang. In the ’80s, this could be seen in the hordes of black-clad women, many of whom considered themselves feminists and were eager, like the architect Kazuyo Sejima, whose firm recently completed the New Museum in Lower Manhattan, to express themselves radically. In 1992, Kawakubo decided to branch out and gave a young patternmaker, Junya Watanabe, his own label, a move that revealed her to be an innovative businesswoman as well. By the end of the ’90s, "multibrands” had taken over the industry. Since then, she has added Tao by Tao Kurihara and, more recently, a youth-oriented label called Ganryu, by the baby-faced Fumito Ganryu, 31, who has been with the company for four years. Kawakubo and her husband, Adrian Joffe, also operate the eclectic Dover Street Market in London, giving the Comme des Garçons company another way to burnish its avant-garde image while continuing to grow. These new ventures now account for 22 percent of the company’s annual sales, which in 2007 were $180 million, said Joffe.
Editors still follow Kawakubo’s shows with rapt interest. But more and more you wonder why they go. What do they expect to learn from this small, dour woman whose gnomic pronouncements ("Red is the new black”) would surely qualify as Gumpisms if they hadn’t been issued before we found such things funny? As it is, hardly any of the editors wear her clothes nowadays — and that’s also true in Tokyo, said Kazuhiro Saito, the editor in chief of Japanese Vogue. "Even five years ago, Comme des Garçons was kind of part of the national wardrobe,” said Tiffany Godoy, a writer who has followed Tokyo fashion for a decade and who has recently published a book on Harajuku street style. "But that’s not the case anymore.” And while Kawakubo offers women the possibility to own a runway garment for $1,000 — largely because she doesn’t spend a lot of money on marketing and because she uses the same mills and factories she has always used — young Japanese women prefer European brands at more than twice the price. "They want to look like celebrities,” Godoy pointed out.
Kawakubo’s influence, then, on the self-perceptions of women, on beauty and, above all, on tailoring, is not what it once was. Or, let’s say her methods of working — independently, mostly in solitude and with absolute control over every facet of her business — are so at variance with the rest of the industry that it’s harder for a contemporary audience to appreciate her sensibility. Much of fashion today is accessible to people because of information technology. But it is also accessible because the most desirable brands are designed by groups of people — teams for bags and shoes, others for clothes. There is nothing wrong with this approach — many artists work in collaboration, after all — but it scarcely produces the same quality of insight, makes the same impertinent claims on our feelings, as the individual working only for the satisfaction of her own ideas. As Sonya Park, a stylist in Tokyo who knows Kawakubo well, said recently, "She makes her profit so that she can do something new the next season. It’s always about the next project. That’s why I see her as someone who wants to express the world through fashion. She just wants to keep on doing it.” This is an artistic choice, and a sane one, a combination that doesn’t really work in the dress business. The fact that Kawakubo made it work is remarkable, and it’s why more than ever she deserves our attention.
In December I went to see her in Tokyo. I was hoping to write about how she had created a multibrand company that completely anticipated the luxury groups in Europe and at the same time was different from them. Unlike other designers of her generation, Kawakubo didn’t just produce cheaper spinoff lines; she created separate and distinct brands. Her approach was a lot like Toyota and Lexus, or Estée Lauder and Clinique. Though each brand was separate, they existed under one umbrella. Yet once I started talking with Watanabe and Kurihara, as well as people in Kawakubo’s outer circle, it was clear the structure idea was just something to hang my hat on. The place is actually an extension of Kawakubo’s brain.
The first thing you should know about the Comme des Garçons headquarters is that it occupies five floors of an ordinary office building on a busy road, each floor as drably functional as the next. Nothing to reveal here except its nothingness. There is no receptionist to greet you or to direct you to the appropriate floor. This would only be a problem if you were actually expected at Comme des Garçons, but very few people are welcomed there, and that also applies to family members. "No husbands, boyfriends, wives, daughters — never,” said Joffe. Which brings us to the second thing you should know about Comme des Garçons: it’s a very secretive place.
Kawakubo, who is 65, said that when she first raised the idea with Watanabe about having his own label, she wasn’t thinking of a business strategy. She just thought Watanabe, who had joined the company straight from design school, was talented. One day she said to him in her half-chiding way, "Isn’t it about time you started your own label?” Design assistants at Comme des Garçons are patterners, and as patterners they must develop a feel not only for shape and texture but also, more tryingly, for what Kawakubo is feeling at the start of a collection, whether she is "happy” or "angry,” sentiments she rarely communicates in any detail. As she once explained, "At the start, I am not exactly certain what I am thinking myself. It is guesswork with us.” What Kawakubo hopes to achieve from this open process is that the patterners will think more intuitively and come up with things that will surprise her.
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