Hiroshima-chic: How Japanese Feminist Rei Kawakubo Challenged Western Ideals of Beauty and Conquered the Fashion World

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1981 in Paris, fashion critics competed in the poisonousness of reviews of the first collection of the Japanese designer: "Hiroshima-chic!", "Post-nuclear fashion". They did not shy away from the opportunity to refer to tragic events in Japanese history. The war really affected a whole galaxy of Japanese designers. In the 1980s, they conquered Europe and the United States with their disturbing and gloomy collections, and the brightest star in the horizon of Japanese deconstructivism was Rei Kawakubo.

The collection was called Destroy. To the drumbeat, models marched down the catwalk in baggy black robes with holes of various sizes, which Rey described as "our lace." That year she was already forty years old, and her Comme des Garçons brand was ten, and she was quite famous in Japan. Admirers of her work were called "a flock of crows" - most of the things were black.

Despite the outrage of critics, the Japanese rebel quickly gained success with an audience tired of elegant silhouettes and chilling evening gowns. Her collections blur all boundaries: fashion and art, east and west, masculine and feminine, depression and meditation.

She denies trends.

The combination of the incongruous, decayed lace, frayed skin, crumpled, torn fabric - Rey is brutal with the material. To create some collections, she buried fabrics in the ground for several weeks so that they acquired the necessary texture. Expensive cashmere was boiled down to the state of felt, luxurious silk was left to fade in the sun …

Kawakubo's cut is just as radical. She admits that she hates symmetry - life begins where perfection ends.

Kawakubo defines his main task in a very simple way: "creating things that never existed." She seems to blow up the design of clothes familiar to Europeans, adding extra sleeves, shifting the collar of the shirt to the hips, and sewing another skirt to the skirt.

In the early 90s, the dominant color in her work was black - now Kawakubo's palette has become much richer.

One of her most significant and scandalous collections is the 1997 Humpbacked Collection. Models took to the podium in costumes that deform their bodies - huge shoulders and hips, asymmetric shapes, humps …

There is not a hint of sexuality in Kawakubo's collections.

At the heart of Kawakubo's experiments are war and feminism. In the seventies, a generation grew up in Japan that did not find the war, but remembered the disturbing atmosphere of the post-war decade. During these years, a feminist movement formed in Japan, which, however, did not have the same influence as in the West. Rei Kawakubo often spoke about the pressure she experienced in her youth. Choosing a creative career and education instead of a family, she gained fame as a hopeless selfish. This annoyed her terribly in her youth, and even now she calls anger one of the driving forces in her work.

Her collections are a story about a woman who does not have to be attractive to men, be naked or show a figure. Rei challenged Western beauty ideals, the ideals and rules of European fashion.

She does not know how to draw, prefers to explain her ideas using gestures and models, works more like a sculptor than an artist. This was the beginning of her career - Rei once worked in a fabric store and became interested in creating draperies on mannequins.

Her favorite trick is to forget. She starts a new collection by forgetting everything she has seen before. She is not inspired by fashion, but by chance - photography, a person on the street, an intangible image, something in a trash can … The most difficult thing is the beginning.

Her fashion label is called Comme des Garçons - "like boys," which Rey says doesn't make any sense.

Rei controls everything. Unlike many of her colleagues, she does not limit herself to creating images, but leads the business at every stage. The atmosphere of the shops, the location of the logo on the page of the booklet, the thickness of the border on the dress are all equally important for Kawakubo. Everything should be subordinated to her philosophy and aesthetics.

Comme des Garçons boutiques often open in buildings for demolition, where you do not need to spend extra money on decoration, because shabby wallpaper and peeling plaster serve as the best decorations for clothes from Rei Kawakubo. In addition to clothing, Comme des Garçons produces accessories, perfumes, furniture.

The fabrics for Kawakubo's collections are also created under her watchful eye. It invests in the development of textiles and in the restoration of old technologies, for example, it buys up the machines of old, ruined industries in order to reuse them. The technology of creating complex textures of things, the Comme des Garçons brand, is a trade secret.

She is one of the most private designers - she rarely gives interviews, does not talk about her personal life. She does not live in Paris, preferring Tokyo to him, practically does not attend the shows of her colleagues (the exception was Gosha Rubchinsky). She has a husband, Adrian Joffe, a life partner, friend and permanent right hand in Comme des Garçons.

Rei likes to take on something new, unfamiliar to her - this allows her to work without regard to existing rules and traditions.

So it happened with the creation of perfume - Rey managed to bring very strange and shocking fragrances to the market. She says she uses the most unusual combinations she can think of - rubber, nail polish, volcanic ash, seawater, dolls' cellulose hair, metal, sand, pebbles, clay, soda and fake leather. Odeur 53 contains fifty-three insane ingredients! They all have one thing in common: they are not organic, which is completely uncharacteristic for the perfume industry. Comme des Garçons ads do without images of the clothes themselves - here Rey also violates generally accepted rules.

Today, critics say that every second designer's collections have something of Rei Kawakubo. And she … does not plan to stop there.