“The only thing important to me is making clothes,”[1] Rei Kawakubo once said. For more than four decades, she has continually upset the industry apple cart by challenging accepted standards of beauty. Among the many tipping points in her career was the bulbous, padded Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress collection of 1996: “Critics denounced the designs as ‘tumor’ dresses,” Vogue later observed, “but Kawakubo weathered the outrage, and her larger achievement—her avant-garde triumph—was that she gave people a chance to feel passionately about fashion.”[2]
The designer—who told The New Yorker in 2005 that she “never intended to start a revolution”[3]—galvanized the international fashion world when her label, Comme des Garçons, made its Paris debut in April 1981. (She was already so famous in Japan that her black-clad followers were nicknamed “crows.”)[4] Her stated intention from the start was to show “what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”[5] Indeed, during the 1980s, Kawakubo’s inky, seemingly formless, garments stood in direct opposition to the bright, body-conscious clothing championed by the likes of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana. Throwing political correctness to the wind, Montana once labeled Kawakubo’s controversial look “post-atomic.” Another put-down then commonly tossed in her direction was “ragpicker”; and, in 1983, The Christian Science Monitor suggested that “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys) might more aptly be titled Comme des Clochards (Like the Tramps).”[6]
Kawakubo later said that the aggressiveness of the early showings was “a little game to put ourselves on the map,”[7] yet, many years on, she continues to wage war against conformity. There is hardly a designer who does not respect Kawakubo, and many observers consider her contribution to fashion to be as great as that of Balenciaga, or perhaps even Chanel. Her influence extends beyond garments to innovations in fragrance and retailing. “Comme des Garçons,” Kawakubo told Vogue in 1995, “is a gift to oneself, not something to appeal or attract the opposite sex.”[8]
In 1987, Vogue predicted that this designer of one-step-further fashion would be recognized “as the woman who will lead fashion into the twenty-first century.”[9] And so she has.
Source: http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Rei_Kawakubo
As I have mentioned before, I very much respect the philosophies and attitudes that Kawakubo and Yamamoto hold toward design. In particular, Kawakubo's quote:
"Creation cannot be calculated"
This really resonates with my process and with what I was discussing earlier in relation to my imperfect working process. I feel in a way that creation seems to be too calculated. In fashion in particular, as it is such a fast moving mecca of creation. Are we forcing creation into a calculated routine through constantly maintaining a rigid and strict timeline in which to churn out creations for the market? In some ways I wish fashion could slow down so that we may see a more genuine and lengthy progression of creative calculation.
As a singular design entity, I very much feel the need for a loose time structure. I work best when I creatively feel inclined to do so, but I can work also outside of this. Perhaps I feel that the outcomes are better when I feel creative because I am enjoying the outflow of thought and the creation process more.
The long and short of it however, is that I essentially agree with this philosophy, but at the same time, I note the difficulties of its definition when placed in the context of timelines in the fashion industry.
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