Rei Kawakubo: For and Against Fashion 9781350118249, 1350118249

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Rei Kawakubo

ii

Rei Kawakubo For and Against Fashion

EDITED BY REX BUTLER

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection, editorial matter, Introductions © Rex Butler, 2023 Individual chapters © their Authors, 2023 Rex Butler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Cape, Blood and Roses collection, Spring/Summer 2015 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi and David Tune, 2020 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1822-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1823-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-1824-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Peter Beiers, enthusiast extraordinaire 1964–2018

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Contents List of plates  ix List of illustrations  xii Notes on contributors  xviii

Introduction: For and against fashion  Rex Butler  1  1 Couture clash  Akiko Fukai  11  2 The empire designs back  Barbara Vinken  19  3 Rei Kawakubo as a retail format pioneer  Karinna Grant

and Kat Duffy  27  4 Rei Kawakubo: Agent provocateur in a hyper-glamourized

world  Llewellyn Negrin  47  5 Rei Kawakubo and the luxury of freedom  Ory Bartal  65  6 Rei Kawakubo: Defiance personified  Yuniya Kawamura  87  7 Exploring the theoretical meaning of Rei Kawakubo: Two waves

of Japanese fashion in the West and Georg Simmel’s fashion dualism  Tets Kimura  99  8 The subversively cute side of Comme des Garçons:

Rei Kawakubo and romantic transgression  Masafumi Monden  117  9 Breaking the idea of clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s fashion

manifesto  Karen de Perthuis  137 10 The complexity of Kawakubo: A radical form of

consciousness  Bronwyn Clark-Coolee  157

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CONTENTS

11 Between clothing and flesh: Kawakubo at the Met 

Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas  177 12 Kawakubo’s solipsism: The art of the in-between at the Met 

Amelia Winata  193 13 Rei Kawakubo: Fashion degree zero  Rex Butler  209 Index  231

Plates  1

Dover Street Market, London View of stall selling T-shirts, mirror on side Photo by View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 144834056

 2

Cindy Sherman. Untitled, 1994 Chromogenic colour print, 124.4 × 83.8 cm Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth © Cindy Sherman

 3

Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva. Paper Surgery, 2010 Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Spring/Summer 2010 Image courtesy of Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva

 4

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons MONSTER collection, Autumn/Winter 2014–15, Paris Fashion Week, 1 March 2014 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 475798749

 5

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons The Future of the Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017 Photo by Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 648498104

 6

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Persona collection, Spring/ Summer 2018, Paris Fashion Week, 30 September 2017 Photo by Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 856523948

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PLATES

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Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Not Making Clothing collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013 Photo by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 182121102

 8

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Blood and Roses collection, Spring/Summer 2015, Paris Fashion Week, 27 September 2014 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 456203798

 9

Hanae Mori. East Meets West collection, Tokyo, 9 September 2004 Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 51277621

10

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Ceremony of Separation collection, Autumn/Winter 2015–16, Paris Fashion Week, 7 March 2015 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 465499034

11

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Dress, Crush collection, Spring/Summer 2013 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi, 2019 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV

12

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Blue Witch collection, Spring/Summer 2016, Paris Fashion Week, 3 October 2015 Photo by Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 491130160

13

The entrance to Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between showing the category Absence/Presence at centre The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017 Art Resource 678545

PLATES

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14

Jason Rhoades. Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé, 2006 Mixed media, dimensions variable Private Collection Courtesy the Estate of Jason Rhoades Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner © The Estate of Jason Rhoades Installation view, Black Pussy Soirée Macramé, 3113 Beverley Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2006 Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio

15

Isa Genzken. Elefant, 2006 Wood, plastic tubes, curtain strips, plastic foil, mirror foil, artificial flowers, fabric, plastic, toy figures, bubble foil, adhesive tape, lacquer, spray paint, 200 × 220 × 100 cm Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Cologne/New York © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Viscopy Ltd., Sydney

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Rachel Harrison. Huffy Howler, 2004 Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, Huffy Howler bicycle, handbags, rocks, stones, gravel, brick, one sheepskin, two fox tails, metal pole, wire, pigmented inkjet print and binder clips, 213.4 × 213.4 × 76.2 cm Photo by Jean Vong Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Illustrations  I.1

Portrait of Rei Kawakubo 2017 Bernard Weil, Toronto Star Getty Images Editorial Number 502257191  3

 I.2

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jacket, skirt and shoes, Ballerina Motorbike collection, Spring/Summer 2005 Collection of Takamasa Takahashi Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  6

 1.1 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Holes collection,

Autumn/Winter 1982-3 Photograph by Peter Lindbergh Image courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation  12  1.2 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Patchworks and X

collection, Spring/Summer 1983 Photograph by Peter Lindbergh Image courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation  15  2.1 Madeleine Vionnet. Silk crêpe romaine pyjamas, c. 1931

Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene Image courtesy George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives AB  23  2.2 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Twist, Silk and Jersey

collection, Autumn/Winter 1984–5 Photograph by Peter Lindbergh Image Courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation  24  3.1 The characteristics of a luxury fashion flagship store  30  3.2 Types of third space  34  3.3 The characteristics of a fashion pop-up store  37

ILLUSTRATIONS

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 3.4 Dover Street Market, London Exterior view of shop by night

Photo by View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 144834095  39  3.5 Dover Street Market, London View of womenswear with

Marc Newson chairs in foreground Photo by View Pictures/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 144834067  40  4.1 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jacket, shirt and

skirt, Patchworks and X collection, Spring/Summer 1983 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Takamasa Takahashi, 2005; Boots, Patchworks and X collection, Spring/Summer 1983 Collection of Takamasa Takahashi © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  50  4.2 Comme des Garçons store, Chelsea, New York Image

courtesy Daniel ‘Dusty’ Albanese  52  4.3 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jumper, bloomers, tights

and shoes, MONSTER collection, Autumn/Winter 2014–15 Collection of Takamasa Takahashi Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  60  5.1 Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body in Rei Kawakubo/

Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017 Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 675468432  70  5.2 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. The Future of the

Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017 Photo by Estrop/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 648224190  71

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ILLUSTRATIONS

 5.3 Tsuguya Inoue, Invitation for Comme des Garçons, Spring/

Summer 1998, 1997 From North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalogue, College of the Atlantic Image courtesy Tsuguya Inoue  75  5.4 Tsuguya Inoue. Calendar ’90–’99 for Comme des Garçons,

1990 Image courtesy Tsuguya Inoue  76  5.5 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Top, Body Meets Dress –

Dress Meets Body collection, Spring/Summer 1997 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Supporters of Fashion and Textiles, 2018; Skirt, Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection, Spring/Summer 1997 National of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi through the Australian Cultural Gifts Program, 2015 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  78  6.1 Yohji Yamamoto. Women’s Autumn/Winter 2020–1 Ready-

to-Wear collection, Paris, 28 February 2020 Photo by François Guillot/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 1204034583  89  6.2 Issey Miyake. Women’s Spring/Summer 1995 Ready-to-Wear

collection, Paris, 4 November 1994 Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 1231730394  90  7.1 Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Portrait of Madame Henriot, 1882

Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm Hamburger Kunsthalle, Wikipedia Commons  102  7.2 Issey Miyake. Spring collection show, Intrepid Sea, Air and

Space Museum, New York, 4 November 1982 Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 1216267529  106

ILLUSTRATIONS

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 7.3 Issey Miyake. Ensemble/Pleats Please, c. 1994 The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Estate of Jean Stein, 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art Resource 678425  107  7.4 Yohji Yamamoto. Paris collection, Spring/Summer

1984, Women’s Runway, 1 October 1983 Image courtesy fashionanthology/Afloimages  108  8.1 Ballerina Motorbike in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons:

Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 May 2017 Photo by George Pimentel/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 675471352  120  8.2 Vivienne Westwood. Mini-Crini, 1985 Gift of Annie McIntyre,

1999 Image courtesy Kew Historical Society, Melbourne Photograph Robert Baker  122  8.3 Elisabeth Loise Vigée Le Brun. Marie Antoinette in Chemise

Dress, 1783 Oil on canvas, 89.8 × 72 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Hessische Hausstiftung, Kronberg im Taun, Wikipedia Commons  123  8.4 Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons. White Drama collection,

Spring/Summer 2012, Paris Fashion Week, 1 October 2011 Photo by François Guillot/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 127769794  129  9.1 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Not Making Clothing

collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013 Photo by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 182123178  139  9.2 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Not Making Clothing

collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013 Photo by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 182120581  140

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ILLUSTRATIONS

 9.3 Giacomo Balla. Antineutral/Futurist Suit, 1918 Image courtesy

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London  143  9.4 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Top, skirt and shoes,

Tomorrow’s Black collection, Spring/Summer 2009 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi and David Tune, 2020 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  146 10.1 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Blue Witch collection,

Spring/Summer 2016, Paris Fashion Week, 3 October 2015 Photo by Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 491139106  167 10.2 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Ceremony of Separation

collection, Autumn/Winter 2015–16, Paris Fashion Week, 7 March 2015 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 465499968  168 11.1 Cubisme in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the

In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017 Photo by George Pimentel/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 675588182  178 11.2 Inside Decoration in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the

In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017 Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 675588178  185 11.3 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. The Future of the

Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017 Photo by François Guillot/AFP via Getty Images Getty Editorial Number 647874268  190 12.1 Exhibition map of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of

the In-Between, The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017  194

ILLUSTRATIONS

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12.2 The Model/Multiple section of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des

Garçons: Art of the In-Between comprised of skirts from Abstract Excellence, Spring/Summer 2004, The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017 Art Resource 678528  195 12.3 The Self/Other section of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des

Garçons: Art of the In-Between showing details of the two subcategories Male/Female (left) and East/West (right), Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017 Art Resource 678566  198 12.4 Installation shot of Collecting Comme at the National Gallery

of Victoria, 31 October 2019 to 26 July 2020 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  205 13.1 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Cacophony collection,

Spring/Summer 2008, Paris Fashion Week, 2 October 2007 Photo by Michelle Leung/WireImage Getty Images Editorial Number 79701656  212 13.2 Frank Gehry, Santa Monica Place, Los Angeles, 1980 Photograph

by Tim Street-Porter Image courtesy Gehry Partners LLP  215 13.3 Morphosis Studio, Angeli Restaurant, 7274 Melrose Avenue,

Los Angeles, 1984 Photograph by Paul Warchol Image courtesy Morphosis Studio  216 13.4 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Dress, Crush collection,

Spring/Summer 2013 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi, 2019 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  221 13.5 Installation shot of Collecting Comme at the National Gallery

of Victoria, 31 October 2019 to 26 July 2020 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV  228

Contributors Ory Bartal is Head of the Department of History and Theory at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He is an expert in Japanese marketing and business practices, working for more than ten years for technology companies active in the Japanese market. He is the author of Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Persuasion and the Tokyo Art Director’s Club (2015) and Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury and the Avant-Garde (2020). Rex Butler is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University in Melbourne. He writes on Australian art and has authored a series of monographs on theoretical figures (Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze). His most recent book is Victory over Death: The Art of Colin McCahon (2021) with Laurence Simmons. Bronwyn Clark-Coolee works at the University of Technology Sydney in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. Her research areas include issues and theories in contemporary art, the historical avant-garde, feminism and art, and art and fashion. ‘Lee Miller in Fashion’ (2015) is one typical publication. She also is a practising artist with work included in the exhibition Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art (2017) at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Karen de Perthuis teaches in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. She has published extensively in the areas of fashion design, fashion photography, street style blogs, material culture, performance and cinematic costume design. She is the author of ‘How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram’ (2019) and is currently working on a monograph, The Fashionable Ideal: Body, Model and Image in Fashion. Kat Duffy is Senior Lecturer in Management in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. She has published in Journal of Business Research, Consumption Markets and Culture and Journal of Retailing and

CONTRIBUTORS

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Consumer Services. She is currently engaged in projects on sustainable clothing and sustainable consumption. She has co-written ‘Save Your Wardrobe: Supporting Sustainable and Mindful Clothing Consumption’ (2022) and with Karinna Nobbs [Grant] ‘Omnichannel Storytelling the  Reformation Way’ (2018) and ‘Strategic Approaches to Augmented Reality Deployment by Luxury Brands’ (2021). Akiko Fukai is Chief Curator at the Kyoto Costume Institute. She has co-authored Kimono Refashioned: Japan’s Impact on International Fashion (2018), edited Fashion: The Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute – A History from the 18th to the 20th Century (2012) and Fashion: A Fashion History of the 20th Century (2012) and curated Revolution in Fashion 1715–1815 (1988), Japonisme in Fashion (1996), Luxury in Fashion Reconsidered (2009–10) and Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion (2010). Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at the Sydney College of Arts, a Faculty of the University of Sydney. With Vicki Karaminas, he has written, amongst others, Fashion and Art (2012), Queer Style (2013), Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (2015), Critical Fashion: From Westwood to Van Beirendonck (2017), The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization (2018) and Art, Fashion, Popular Culture and the Upending of Tradition (2021). Karinna Grant is an Educator, Nowist and Connector. She is a published author, previously consulting and lecturing globally on retail innovation and the digitalization of the fashion sector. In 2019 she created HOT:SECOND, a circular economy concept store trading physical goods for digital experiences. In 2020 she co-founded THE DEMATERIALISED with Marjorie Hernandez, a Web3 marketplace for fashion NFTs powered by the LUKSO blockchain. Vicki Karaminas is Professor of Fashion and Director of Doctoral Research at Massey University, New Zealand. She has co-authored numerous books with Adam Geczy. Other publications include The Men’s Fashion Reader (2009), Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009), Shanghai Street Style (2013) and Fashion in Popular Culture (2013). Yuniya Kawamura is Professor of Sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She is the author of The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (2004), Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (2005), Fashioning Japanese Subcultures (2013), Sneakers: Fashion, Gender and Subculture (2019) and Doing Research in Fashion and Dress: An Introduction to Qualitative Methods (2020).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tets Kimura is undertaking a PhD on Japanese fashion and soft power at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of ‘The Creation of Contemporary Taiwanese Fashion: A Shift in Tainan City towards Original Design’ (2016), ‘Japan’s Soft Power: A Case Study of Uniqlo and AKB48’ (2017) and ‘Evolution of the Perception of Japanese Culture in the West: From Unknown, Mysterious, Exotic to Cool’ (2020). He is a recipient of a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship, an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a National Library of Australia Asian Studies Grant. Masafumi Monden is a lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney. He writes and teaches on modern Japanese cultural history, fashion, art and popular culture, gender studies, Japanese language and international relations focusing on Australia's ties with Asia. Masafumi is currently working on two book-length projects: a co-authored book on Japanese shōjo culture and its cross-cultural influences and a sole-authored book project that looks at the cultural history of male modelling in Japan as a means to engage with visual and consumer culture and the interlinked histories of race, ageing, technology, fashion and consumption. Llewellyn Negrin was Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Masters of Fine Arts at the School of Creative Arts, University of Tasmania. Her research interests are in the role of aesthetics in art and everyday life, particularly as it relates to the fashioning of appearance. She has published a book, Appearance and Identity: Fashioning the Body in Postmodernity (2008), and essays in such journals as Theory, Culture & Society, Body & Society and Feminist Theory. Most recently she published ‘The Dialectical Nature of Cindy Sherman’s Fashion Photographs’ (2020). Barbara Vinken is Professor of Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is the author of Fashion after Fashion: Dream and Spirit at the End of the 20th Century (1994), Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (2010), Attraction; The Secret of Fashion (2013) and The Flowers of Fashion: Classic and New Texts on the Philosophy of Fashion (2016). She has also written on Flaubert, pornography, Cindy Sherman and the notion of bodily stigmata. Amelia Winata is currently undertaking a PhD in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She has written for The Saturday Paper, Art Monthly Australasia, Art Collector Magazine, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP). She is also an editor of the Melbourne-based art publications Memo Review and Index Journal.

Introduction For and against fashion Rex Butler

O

f all the world’s fashion designers today, it is Rei Kawakubo who has most challenged the field of fashion itself. She is often called by commentators a ‘designer’s designer’, and her work described as ‘austere’, ‘cerebral’ and ‘intellectual’.1 Suzy Menkes, the long-time fashion columnist for the International Herald Tribune, has spoken of Kawakubo’s work in terms of its ‘abstract artistry’.2 Dutch fashion theorist Anneke Smelik thinks her work in terms of ‘negative aesthetics’,3 and her clothing is frequently compared to the philosophical movement of ‘deconstructivism’.4 Summarizing all of this, journalist Judith Thurman in a long essay on Kawakubo that originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2005 suggests that Kawakubo has ‘abandoned representational fashion and introduced the notion of clothing as wearable abstraction’.5 Perhaps what all of these commentators are trying to get at is the sense that with Kawakubo the real subject of her fashion is the system of fashion itself. Of course, in a way this has always been true of fashion. The great modernist designers like Chanel, Schiaparelli and Dior all made clothes with an acute sense of what was in and out of fashion, what the existing rules of fashion were and how they must be subtly updated to remain à la mode. Punk and the various anti-fashions of the 1970s also took the rules of fashion as their subject, precisely in order to parody, overturn and do away with them. But, as history tells us, they ultimately failed to do so. Punk becomes another style, and the difference between the high fashion of Chanel and the anti-fashion of someone like Vivienne Westwood becomes harder to discern

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when we realize that both were awarded retrospectives at major costume museums within a year of each other.6 It is this situation that Kawakubo makes the subject of her work. How is it that – like the modernists – we can make beautiful clothes only by following the rules? But how is it possible to do so when – after the postmodernists – there are no longer any rules to follow?7 This accounts perhaps for the true abstraction of Kawakubo’s designs. It is not merely their literal abstraction, their moving away from the outlines of the body, their emphasis on the techniques of their making, their ‘non-natural’ colours and materials, but also the sense that in them the rules of fashion are being followed at the moment they no longer apply, that at the same time as she works within fashion she also reflects upon it from somewhere else. In other words, Kawakubo ‘returns’ to fashion after the anti-fashion of punk, but now the rules are not unconsciously, instinctively, unhesitatingly followed (even if this means updating them when it feels right). Rather, they are conscious, visible, distant from themselves, having to be discovered for the first time at the very moment they are seen no longer to apply. It is all of this that Kawakubo might be said to mean by such well-known aphorisms as ‘I don’t have a definition of beauty’ and ‘I try to create more theoretically or spiritually’.8 But the evidence for what we have just said lies in the slow, patient elaboration of her clothes, both in themselves, in relation to those by other designers and in relation to the culture at large. And, with this in mind, this collection of essays was put together on the basis that Kawakubo’s work, without having to be justified by the adjective ‘philosophical’ or the category ‘work of art’, merited the same detailed and sustained attention as other significant cultural artefacts. There are wonderful pictorial representations of Kawakubo’s work, there are academic treatments of her role within the wider Japanese fashion ‘revolution’ that took place in Paris from the 1970s on  –  many of which are acknowledged in the essays that follow – but this is a monographic study of Kawakubo, which seeks to disengage the ‘specificity’ of her work and thereby make a special case for it. (See Figure I.1). Of course, ‘specificity’ is a complex word to use with regard to Kawakubo, insofar as it is she more than any other contemporary designer who opens up not merely fashion to its outside but a distance of fashion onto itself. But it is just this distance that makes possible a space for writing on her, given that her work is already a kind of ‘discursive’ reflection upon fashion. We begin here with excerpts from two of the more significant commentators on Kawakubo. The first, which forms Chapter 1, is by Akiko Fukai, the Director and Chief Curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute, who takes up the crucial showings of Kawakubo’s work in Paris in the early 1980s and the question of the ‘Japaneseness’ seen to be at stake in them. Fukai’s well-made point,

INTRODUCTION

3

FIGURE I.1   Portrait of Rei Kawakubo 2017. repeated in a number of the essays that follow, is that their ‘Japaneseness’ is not some quality innate to the clothes themselves, but arises only in their reception in the West. We then reprint as Chapter 2 part of an essay by German Literature Professor Barbara Vinken, in which she compares Kawakubo’s fashion to a previous conception of how clothes relate to the human body, as seen in the esteemed early-twentieth-century Parisian couturier Madeleine Vionnet.9 Vinken in her essay, again in an insight shared by a number of the other contributors, draws a contrast between Vionnet’s clothes, which at once ‘reveal’ and ‘conceal’ the body, and Kawakubo’s, which ‘wrap’ or ‘package’ it. In a sense, these two foundational texts set the terms for what follows. Fukai, we might suggest, puts forward the wider social, cultural and economic

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context in which to consider Kawakubo’s clothing, while Vinken offers a detailed formal analysis of one particular dress. But, as we see repeatedly played out in what follows, part of the innovation of Kawakubo’s practice is that she confuses the two approaches, sees no necessary distinction between her clothes ‘in themselves’ and the worldly circumstances (both social and commercial) in which they are bought and worn. This is the point made in the first of the essays commissioned for this book, Chapter 3, which is by the London-based fashion theorists Karinna Grant and Kat Duffy. They begin there with Kawakubo’s famous remark that she considers herself to be just as much a ‘business woman’ as a fashion designer. Grant and Duffy then analyse in detail the retail strategies of the Comme flagship store in Tokyo, the pop-up outlets that started in 2004 and the Dover Street Market that opened the same year, and then argue that we find the same ‘innovation’ and ‘experimentation’ in them as we find in Kawakubo’s clothes. This argument is carried on by Australian fashion scholar Llewellyn Negrin in Chapter 4, who similarly suggests that Kawakubo’s practice sits on the boundary between fashion and commerce, so that each operates as a ‘critique’ of the other. As Negrin says at one point: ‘Kawakubo has not lost her critical perspective on the fashion industry in spite of her integral involvement with it. While she recognizes the impossibility of locating herself outside of the commodity realm, as the artistic avant-garde of the first part of the twentieth century sought to do, neither does she simply capitulate to it.’ And further extending this line of argument, in Chapter 5 the Israeli design historian Ory Bartal speaks of the way that this conscious putting together of art and commerce has been part of Western culture since at least the 1960s, so that at once the work of art, or fashion in this case, is a commodity and the commodity a work of art. The next three essays seek to think the ‘wider’ socio-cultural context behind Kawakubo’s work, and particularly the question of her ‘Japaneseness’ (although, as those first essays have already argued, the commercial or even economic aspects of Kawakubo’s work cannot be separated from the cultural, so that to understand the marketing of her clothes is already to understand much about them). In Chapter 6, the New York-based fashion theorist Yuniya Kawamura first of all sets out the ‘defiance’ embodied in the fact that Kawakubo is a woman designer and can be understood to be designing from a feminist perspective. But then  –  and this is the complicating factor that runs throughout much of what follows – Kawamura equally makes clear that Kawakubo wants her defiance to be acknowledged and that her work is not a simple rejection of fashion as such. In the next essay in this section, Chapter 7, Australian doctoral student Tets Kimura begins by situating Kawakubo within the long history, beginning at least by the middle of the nineteenth century, of the reception of Japanese culture in Europe. But he then makes the point that, if in that first nineteenth-century ‘wave’, Europeans either travelled to Japan

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or adopted selected elements of Japanese culture that arrived in Europe, in a second ‘wave’ from the mid-1960s of which Kawakubo was part, it was Japanese designers themselves who came to Europe and evidently had more agency over the reception of their work. In Chapter 8, the third essay in this section, Australian fashion researcher Masafumi Monden follows Kawamura and Kimura in thinking the ‘femininity’ at stake in Kawakubo’s clothes and – unusually in Kawakubo criticism – its Japanese aesthetic of ‘shōjo’ or ‘girlishness’, particularly in her early collections but occurring throughout her career. In Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2005 collection Ballerina Motorbike and Spring/Summer 2012 collection White Drama, for example, we can find qualities of ‘cuteness’ and ‘play-sexiness’ that are not antithetical to notions of ‘beauty’ and ‘femininity’ while also arguably being empowering to women. In the next section of the book, we include a number of essays that could be understood to address Kawakubo’s clothes more directly or, if this is not quite the distinction we are looking for, speak of them more in terms of artistic and philosophical movements rather than social and commercial ones (although, again, we must insist that it is also this distinction Kawakubo’s clothes contest). The first, Chapter 9, is by Australian fashion scholar Karen de Perthuis, who analyses in detail Kawakubo’s well-known 2013 ‘Fashion Manifesto’. De Perthuis, like Kimura, makes an at first unexpected connection to Kawakubo, this time to the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, before finally distinguishing them, insisting that Kawakubo unlike the Futurists still makes fashion. As de Perthuis writes: ‘In breaking the idea of clothes, Kawakubo does not so much ignore the normal work of clothes as add to what clothes do, to what they can be. She challenges what clothes signify, confounding register and mode.’ This ‘ambiguity’ and even ‘confusion’ is also the subject addressed in Chapter 10 by Australian fashion academic Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, who seeks to think how Kawakubo’s clothing is experienced or how it might be said to affect us. Her description of it, taken from Roland Barthes’ famous analysis of photography in Camera Lucida, is ‘shock’ and ‘astonishment’, and she goes on to ask how a proper account of fashion might express this affect without losing it. And at this point we might want to think back to the essays of Bartal, Kawamura and Monden, who similarly speak of Kawakubo’s work in terms of ‘radical incongruity’, ‘defiance’ and ‘challenge’, and ‘conceptual duplicity’. (See Figure I.2.) We have subtitled this collection of essays on Kawakubo ‘For and Against Fashion’ because we would say, along the lines of what a number of contributors argue, that what her work comes out of is the inseparability of fashion and anti-fashion, and moreover that this inseparability is the very subject of her clothing. (And by ‘anti-fashion’ we might even mean the whole commercial apparatus that surrounds her clothes, as also suggested by a number of the contributors.) It is something hinted at early in Kawakubo’s career when

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FIGURE I.2   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jacket, skirt and shoes, Ballerina Motorbike collection, Spring/Summer 2005. commentators  –  perhaps without realizing the full consequences of what they were saying – spoke of her controversial Autumn/Winter 1982–3 show, Destroy, in terms of a post-Hiroshima ‘Day After’, as though her distressed and dishevelled black clothes were what would be worn by the survivors of a nuclear catastrophe. And, indeed, fashion today  –  at once the condition Kawakubo responds to and helps bring about for those designers following her – does have this quality of coming after the end, of arriving after fashion is over. Fashion would no longer simply be itself, but always be separated from itself by a kind of gap or absence, which is the space of its logic, signification and attempted self-reflexivity. It is perhaps what philosopher Kiyokazu Washida

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means when he speaks of Kawakubo ‘constantly reinventing the “now”, producing the “now”, before the “now” is usurped’.10 But it is also conversely to be found in a designer such as the Belgian Martin Margiela refusing to innovate, and literally remaking a new collection out of the previous ones. A wide variety of methodological approaches is brought to bear in this volume in an attempt to get at the ‘specificity’ of Kawakubo’s work, from fashion-based formal analyses to broader socio-cultural contextualizations, to the reading of it through the work of fashion theorists and philosophers, to the analysis of Comme des Garçon’s commercial operations, to the relation of the clothes to artists, architects and other designers. Questions are asked throughout as to the ultimate meaning of Kawakubo’s clothing, whether it can be seen as ‘radical’ in its autonomy, in the manner of a whole series of twentieth-century avant-gardes, or ‘radical’ even in its declared lack of autonomy, going against what has conventionally been understood as the particular power of art. And perhaps, as a number of contributors acknowledge and even try to find language for  –  ‘ambiguous’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘conflictual’, ‘deconstructivist’ – it might be in the difficulty of answering these questions, of finding a stable position for Kawakubo’s work, that its true power and critical potential is to be found. For it is evident, both from the variety of approaches on display here, and the divergence of conclusions, even occasionally within the same essay, the challenge that Kawakubo’s work poses both for its commentators and ultimately the whole discipline of fashion writing itself. But we hope that this collection – in its very imperfections, hesitations, lack of answers and, yes, even occasionally its distress – captures something of Kawakubo’s work and what it means at once to individual fashion scholars and the culture at large. Indeed, many of the issues discussed here came out in full force in the 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art show Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. Arranged not chronologically but by theme and colour in a series of individually shaped rooms, the exhibition was organized around a number of oppositions, both with regard to Kawakubo’s overall career (Fashion/ Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design and Clothes/Not Clothes) and individual collections (thus within the category Clothes/Not Clothes, the curator spoke of the Spring/Summer 2014 collection in terms of form/function, the Autumn/ Winter 2016–17 collection in terms of order/chaos and the Spring/Summer 2017 collection in terms of abstraction/representation).11 But, as is made clear there, this division of the work into categories is ultimately to reveal that what Kawakubo aims at is as much as anything their breaking down or the space in between them (the Japanese concept ma, meaning gap or interval), and beyond that the emptiness they are both a response to and an attempt to cover over (the Japanese concept mu, meaning void or emptiness). And to bring the book to a conclusion, we include two essays that address different aspects of

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Art of the In-Between. The first, Chapter 11, by Australian- and New Zealandbased fashion scholars Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, addresses in part that series of discursive oppositions the show was structured by. The second, Chapter 12, by Australian–Japanese art historian Amelia Winata, analyses the much commented-upon installation of the exhibition, which many speculate was insisted upon by Kawakubo herself. For suggesting that I, exactly insofar as I was an outsider and non-expert in fashion, undertake the challenge of putting together a collection of essays on Kawakubo, and for remaining committed and encouraging at each stage of the process, I would like to thank Peter Beiers and Izabella Chabrowska. For assisting with reproductions of many of Kawakubo’s works, I would like to thank Danielle Whitfield, curator in the Fashion and Textiles Department at the National Gallery of Victoria and curator of that institution’s important 2019 exhibition Collecting Comme. I would also like to thank each of the contributors to this volume, all of whom are experts in fashion, for their trust and patience throughout its lengthy path to completion. Hopefully, to paraphrase Josh Sims of i-D magazine, who once spoke of the Dover Street Market as ‘Comme made architecture’,12 Rei Kawakubo: For and Against Fashion might be understood as ‘Comme made book’. Finally, this volume is dedicated to the eminent Australian fashion scholar Bonnie English, author of A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century (2007), Fashion: The 50 Most Influential Fashion Designers of All Time (2010) and Japanese Fashion Designers (2011), who originally offered a paper to this collection but passed away before she could do so. Her work remains a constant source of inspiration for all those who write on Japanese fashion in particular and fashion in general, as will be evident to anyone who reads what follows.

Notes 1 See on this Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, Berg, Oxford, 2011, p. 67. 2 Suzy Menkes, ‘The Collection/Paris: Abstract Artistry from Rei Kawakubo’, International Herald Tribune, 10 October 2003. 3 Anneke Smelik, ‘Fashioning the Fold: Multiple Becomings’, in Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (eds), This Deleuzian Century, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2015, p. 46. Admittedly, Smelik will eventually reject the comparison, but Barbara Vinken in this collection will pursue it. 4 A number of the contributors here make this comparison, especially Ory Bartal and Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas.

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5 Judith Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, in ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2008, p. 73. Originally published in The New Yorker, 4 July 2005. 6 Vivienne Westwood, Fashion in Motion, curated by Claire Wilcox, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1 April–11 July 2004; and Chanel, curated by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5 May–7 August 2005. 7 This relationship – or even tension – between modernism and postmodernism is brought out very clearly in the dialogue between Kawakubo and curator Andrew Bolton in Kawakubo’s recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: ‘Andrew Bolton: There are aspects of your work that are postmodern, perhaps most notably deconstructionism. Rei Kawakubo: I hope people come away from the exhibition thinking I am a modernist’, Andrew Bolton, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017, p. 22. This will be in part the subject of Chapter 12, the essay by Amelia Winata in this volume. 8 Cited in Terry Jones (ed.), Rei Kawakubo, Taschen, Cologne, 2012, n.p. 9 There has been in fact an exhibition comparing Kawakubo and Vionnet, Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McArdell and Rei Kawakubo, curated by Harold Koda, Richard Martin and Laura Sinderbrand, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 1987. 10 Kiyokazu Washida, ‘The Past, the Feminine, the Vain’, in Yohji Yamamoto (ed.), Talking to Myself, Carla Sozzani Editore, Milan, 2002, n.p. 11 Andrew Bolton, ‘Introduction: Art of the In-Between’, in Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, pp. 13, 15. 12 Josh Sims, ‘Rewind to the Moment Dover Street Market Landed in London and Rewrote the Rules of Retail’, i-D, The Expressionist issue, No. 249, November 2004 (https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/kz85pw/rewind-to-themoment-dover-street-market-landed-in-london-and-rewrote-the-rules-of-retail) accessed 20 June 2021.

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1 Couture clash Akiko Fukai

I

n October 1982 the word ‘Japanese’ featured prominently in the headlines of newspaper articles reporting on the Spring/Summer 1983 fashion collections. Ten of the seventy or so shows held in Paris over that season were by Japanese designers.1 While the sheer power of these numbers was widely noted, what divided the critics was the shock of the garments unveiled by Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto.2 Throughout 1982 trade disputes had been breaking out between Japan and France, mainly over automobiles and electrical appliances, and the French newspapers gave prominent coverage to these disputes while remaining wary of the inroads being made by Japanese designers. Paris was already well acquainted with Japanese designers. Takado Kenzo was seen as a designer who typified Parisian fashion, and Issey Miyake was also highly regarded.3 In 1977 Mori had become the first Asian woman to be made a member of the exclusive Chambre syndicale de la haute couture in Paris, a branch of the governing body of the French fashion industry, the Fédération française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode; and in April 1981 Kenzo, Miyake and Kansai Yamamoto had featured in an article in the International Herald Tribune under the headline ‘Three Japanese Designers Make Big Dent in Paris’.4 But although Kawakubo and Yamamoto had both established themselves in Japan throughout the previous decade, they made their Parisian debuts of 1981 quietly. They were not yet members of the influential Fédération, and their Autumn/Winter 1981–2 and Spring/Summer 1982 collections were seen by only a handful of people. This included a representative of the French newspaper Libération, however, whose article was one of the first to feature these designers and accurately report their work’s important characteristics, including its emphasis on material, form and deconstruction.5

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By March 1982 Kawakubo and Yamamoto had joined the Fédération, and they presented their Autumn/Winter 1982–3 collections in catwalk shows, as they have done ever since. Kawakubo presented a black sweater pierced with holes (which later became widely known through the photography of Peter Lindbergh), an ecru-coloured sweater given a daring sense of volume by its twisted stitches and a white dress with drawstrings. (See Figure 1.1.) There was already a touch of the ragpicker in the way Yamamoto’s models, who occasionally wore white masks, appeared to be almost dragging the oversized tattered garments down the runway, although there were interesting details around the hemline to catch the eye.

FIGURE 1.1   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Holes collection, Autumn/ Winter 1982–3.

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The clothes proposed by Kawakubo and Yamamoto in October 1982 (Spring/Summer 1983 collections) were so shocking that critics responded with discomfort. The reporter for Le Figaro wrote that their collections sent a chill up her spine. She said of Kawakubo: ‘Her apocalyptic clothing is pierced with holes, tattered and torn, almost like clothing worn by nuclear holocaust survivors.’ The work of Yohji Yamamoto (who was mistakenly named Kansai Yamamoto) was described as ‘clothes for the end of the world that look as if they have been bombed to shreds’.6 There were also positive appraisals, however. In many areas of the press, the clothes of Kawakubo and Yamamoto were now recognized as representing something completely new. Libération and the Washington Post concluded that Kawakubo and Yamamoto were pioneering a new aesthetic.7 The New York Times wrote: ‘The fashions that have swept in from the East represent a totally different attitude toward how clothes should look from that long established here.’8 These clothes may have stood outside the norms of traditional European aesthetics, but nobody could ignore their powerful originality. What the Japanese designers of the 1970s had presented was not the ‘East’ as once expressed through the eyes of such Western designers as Paul Poiret, but clothing that blended Eastern and Western cultures, as seen through the eyes of the East yet still comprehensible to the West. By contrast, although they were thoroughly aware of European culture, Kawakubo and Yamamoto presented clothing that dared to impress on audiences an aesthetic that was far removed from this context. Robbed of a scale or point of reference by which to evaluate the results, audiences seemed disoriented. This was the genesis of what would become Japan’s shake-up of the fashion world. As well as attracting a good deal of media attention, with major newspapers in Europe and the United States devoting considerable space to them, Kawakubo and Yamamoto created shows that were henceforth unmissable for retail buyers. In the way the shows were put together, in the models’ manner and style of walking and, in particular, in Comme des Garçons’ style of make-up, which made the female models look scarred and haggard, the buyers sensed a freshness that was quite different from anything that had come before. In March 1983 (Autumn/Winter 1983–4 collections) Le Figaro, under the headline ‘Les japonais jouent “Les Misérables”’, was still dismissing Kawakubo’s and Yamamoto’s clothes as ‘not fit to be worn by readers of Le Figaro’.9 However, the Japanese designers were increasingly being seen as a match for their French counterparts, as suggested in October 1983 by the Herald Tribune headline ‘The Japanese and Paris: Couture Clash, HeadOn; Eastern Contingent Setting Pace for the Spring-Summer Collections’.10 European and American press accounts of Japanese fashion exhibited an attitude based on a naïve view of Japan as an exotic, far-off land, which the

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Palestinian–American literary theorist Edward Said termed ‘Orientalism’. This was perhaps motivated by a wariness of the newly rampant Japanese economy. But Western commentators would eventually recognize the strength and freshness of Kawakubo’s and Yamamoto’s clothes – qualities that could not be diluted by the Eurocentric gaze. From around 1983, more opportunities arose for exposure in Western magazines, and Japanese fashion gradually secured its position in Europe and the United States as the embodiment of all that was avant-garde, innovative and new. Buyers were quick to react, particularly in the United States, where even those collections produced by Yamamoto prior to his 1981 debut in Paris were sold. In May 1982, Kawakubo’s clothes retailed in just one shop in Paris, but by March 1983 they were also available in Parisian department stores, and by the mid-1980s her tattered black garments could be seen in fashionable boutiques throughout Europe and the United States, laid out flat on inorganic grey shelves.11 The grammar of Japanese fashion became an important social phenomenon that characterized the 1980s and was subsequently inherited by a number of Belgian designers, including Martin Margiela, to become part of the everyday language of fashion in the twenty-first century. But what was this grammar, and why was the aesthetic of Japanese fashion regarded as so shocking? Today, ragged, loose-fitting, frayed black clothes pierced with holes are a common sight. In explanation of this style to the many people who reacted negatively when they first saw it, such Western precedents as the slashed clothes in vogue during the Renaissance and the punk approach of Vivienne Westwood were cited. But the holes, intentional flaws and cloth dangling in shreds in the clothes of Kawakubo and Yamamoto represented a form of ornamentation with a frame of reference that came from outside Europe. The impression they created, which seemed to endorse shabbiness, eschewed the beauty traditionally sought in European clothes, and it was no surprise that they were seen as shaking the very foundations of European fashion. Viewed in the context of Japanese culture, however, this form of expression is less mysterious. The tea ceremony established by Sen no Rikyū in the sixteenth century is but one manifestation of the unique Japanese principles of wabi  –  without decoration or visible luxury  –  and sabi  –  old and atmospheric  –  generating an aesthetic of warping and distortion.12 Edo merchant culture, for example, endorsed the extreme opposites of extravagance and magnificent splendour in the form of a shabby refinement. (See Figure 1.2.)13 Kawakuo and Yamamoto also dispensed with multiple bright colours, instead sticking to stoic achromatic palettes reminiscent of the subtle colour tones of sumi-e (monochrome ink-and-wash painting), as well as the writings of Juni’chirō Tanizaki. In his short book In Praise of Shadows (1933), Tanizaki

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FIGURE 1.2   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Patchworks and X collection, Spring/Summer 1983.

located the essence of Japanese aesthetics in the harmony of shadows. ‘We find beauty not in the thing itself, but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates’, he wrote.14 The black clothing of Kawakubo and Yamamoto, the light and the darkness woven by thread, the shades of colour created when material sags and overlaps, skilfully incorporates shadows as a form of sartorial expression. As Kawakubo hinted when she stated that ‘Red is Black’, Japanese designers in general are able to distinguish various nuances in black, which integrates all colours.15 In contrast to the elegance of the pure black used by such designers as Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, Kawakubo and Yamamoto played with the ambiguity

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of black, just as the existentialists in mid-twentieth-century Paris and the punks in London in the 1970s and 1980s used black – the colour of poverty and mourning – as an expression of social protest. At the same time, black, which Yamamoto described as ‘an intellectual, contemporary colour’, found a following among many other designers in the affluent 1980s as the colour of asceticism.16 Eventually, towards the end of the 1990s, this ambiguity saw black taken up as a major trend, not only dominating fashion but also becoming the colour of the age. Excerpt from Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Centre, London, 2010.

Notes 1 Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Kenzo, Hiroko Koshino, Junko Koshino, Issey Miyake, Hanae Mori, Junko Shimada, Yuki Torii, Kansai Yamamoto and Yohji Yamamoto. 2 Representative of the critics was Nina Hyde, ‘Japan’s Runway Look’, Washington Post, 16 October 1982: ‘Shows by more than 50 designers will be held in the next five days; but the Japanese may have conquered the fashion scene.’ In an article entitled ‘L’Offensive japonaise’ in Le Figaro, 15 October 1982, Martine Henno wrote: ‘In 1983, is there a “yellow peril” on the horizon?’ She viewed the rise of the Japanese icily, but contended that, from a business standpoint, one could not help but accept it. Another article, ‘Sept Japonais ethniques’, Libération, 19 October 1982, stated that in terms of fashion the Japanese had been recognized in Paris. 3 ‘Sept Japonais ethniques’: ‘The first was Kenzo. It was in April 1970. Today, twelve years later, he has become the best face of French fashion.’ 4 Hebe Dorsey, ‘Three Japanese Designers Make Big Dent in Paris’, International Herald Tribune, 7 April 1981. 5 Claire Mises, ‘Prêt-à-Porter 1982’, Libération, 17–18 October 1981: ‘They find their inspiration in the same source: it feels like the Middle Ages as seen in a film by Mizogushi [sic]. Perhaps there is more rigour in Comme des Garçons’ work, giving a completely temporal quality to the clothes. They look as if they have been worn for some time … Ohji [sic] Yamamoto nearly achieves the same refinement, in a more obvious way … These two stylists emphasize the unstructured aspect of the clothes, the suppleness of the fabrics.’ 6 Janie Samer, ‘Printemps/Été 1983, 6 Jours de Mode’, Le Figaro, 21 October 1982. 7 Michel Cressole, ‘Sept Japonais ethniques’, Libération, 19 October 1982: ‘Last March, following the global shake-up that had shattered the verities of the fashion and cultural worlds, the girls from Comme des Garçons (namely Rei Kawakubo) went into exile.’ Nina Hyde, ‘Japan’s Runway Look’, Washington Post, 16 October 1982: ‘Yamamoto and Kawakubo are showing the way to a whole new way of beauty.’

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8 Bernadine Morris, ‘From Japan, New Faces, New Shapes’, New York Times, 14 November 1982. Morris continued: ‘They aim to conceal, not reveal, the body. They do not try to seduce through colour or texture. They cannot be described in conventional terms because their proportions are overscale. Where the hemline is placed or where the waistline is marked is immaterial.’ 9 Janie Samet, ‘Les Japonais jouent “Les Misérables”’, Le Figaro, 18 March 1983: ‘The shocking Japanese were rude (30 minutes late) and had issued the seventh row for the representatives of Le Figaro “non grata” VIPs. Because our readers are not supposed to become their clients. Correct! This miserablism is not for you. Neither are these patched-up clothes, nor these brand-new rags, nor these fabrics tied up hastily like tatters. Nor all this funereal black. Nor the livid make-up of the drawn-looking women. Snobbery in rags that bodes ill for things to come.’ 10 Hebe Dorsey, ‘The Japanese and Paris: Couture Clash, Head on; Eastern Contingent Setting Pace for the Spring–Summer Collections’, International Herald Tribune, 14 October 1983. 11 Mariejo de Loisne, ‘A l’Est, du Nouveau’, Gap, May 1982, p. 118, wrote that sales of Kawakubo’s clothes in Japan were robust. They were sold in the United States at Henri Bendel, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s San Francisco, among other stores. In Paris they were sold at Victoire only, but by March 1983 they were available at Galeries Lafayette. The American fashionindustry journal WWD wrote in its issue of 16 March 1983: ‘Paris – The contingent of Japanese designers who have become part of the fashion establishment here have relinquished neither their favoured colours, black and white, nor their unconventional shapes for Fall. Tied, knotted, jagged and layered, the clothes retain the stark impact for which they have been celebrated in recent seasons. And this season they have maintained their high level of innovation and creativity in textiles.’ When the Autumn/Winter 1982–3 collections were shown in Spring 1982, the names of Kawakubo and Yamamoto began to appear in the buyers’ popularity polls of the French fashion industry Journal du Textile, and in March 1983 they made a rapid ascent, with Yamamoto ranking eleventh and Kawakubo twelfth (Kenzo was third and Miyake seventh). 12 Sen no Rikyū (1522–91), the Japanese tea master who perfected ‘the way of tea’, is known for wabi-tea (or soan-tea), ‘humble tea’, that created a sense of tension by reducing excess to the bare minimum. One could say that Mies van der Rohe’s concept of ‘less is more’ is related. 13 Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), one of Edo Japan’s foremost literary figures, depicted the fashionable men and women of the early Edo period in his novels, describing in acute detail clothing that was often the antithesis of gorgeous extravagance. 14 Jun’chirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933), Tuttle Publishing, Rutland, Vermont, 1977, p. 30. 15 Rei Kawakubo, Red is Black, theme for Autumn/Winter 1988–9. 16 Yohji Yamamoto interviewed by Akiko Fukai on WOWOW television programme, Tokyo, 19 November 2002.

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2 The empire designs back Barbara Vinken

Negative aesthetics Over thirty years on the international stage, Rei Kawakubo has deconstructed the central ideals of Western fashion just as systematically and wittily as Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto. It is not for nothing that she chose Paris in which to launch her label internationally, as well as giving it a French name. Until the early 1970s, Paris’ claim as the capital of fashion was so absolute that it is difficult for us to imagine today. But ‘Orientalism’ was also a part of a very French tradition from Paul Poiret to Yves St Laurent. The clothes of Hanae Mori, the grande dame of Japanese fashion before Kawakubo, could not be more Parisian, but had a touch of Orientalism. In 1977 she became the first Asian woman to be admitted as an official haute couture designer to the Fédération française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode. Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons proclaimed cross-dressing as a fundamental principle, for which she sacrificed her own name in an industry where the making of a name is everything. Kawakubo, who asserts that she does not speak any European languages, claims that she just liked the sound of the words of the French singer Françoise Hardy’s song of 1962, ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’. Which she heard by chance. Whatever the case, by assuming this name, Kawakubo was distancing herself from the work of Mori, whose fashion was the epitome of femininity, and putting herself in the tradition of Chanel, who famously saw the secret of her success in dressing women as garçons, and thereby finally dressing them naturally. Like Mori, Kawakubo continued to take Western fashion as her point of reference, but the manner of reference was radically different from Mori’s.

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Over-fulfilling Western norms, Mori’s clothes sought to be more feminine, more elegant and more perfect than those of Parisian couturiers. To be more Parisian than the Parisians was her secret ideal. Kawakubo, by contrast, exposed the norms that determined Western and thus Parisian fashion by subverting and transgressing them. She iconoclastically questioned one of the unwritten axioms of Western culture: the French monopoly on elegance and the expertise of French couturiers. The focus of her challenge was the ‘Western woman’ as the ideal of beauty, sex appeal and grace. To knock the figure of Mori from her pedestal, Kawakubo worked systematically not only at redefining the relationship between dress and body but also at recoding the associations attached to noble and expensive and lowly and poor fabrics, examining the idea of perfection and reconsidering the relationship between revealing and concealing – that is, the code used to eroticize the body. The cleverly devised asymmetry of her clothes, the loose layering and the mistakes consciously woven into her fabrics branded the idea of the perfect cut, the absolute line and faultless execution as relics from a bygone age. The black pullovers of the Lace collection (Autumn/Winter 1982–3), strewn arbitrarily with holes as if eaten by an army of moths, seemed to come straight from the baggage of a homeless lady. This now legendary collection made an ironic commentary on the most sophisticated arts of embroidery and lacemaking, without failing to attain their sophistication. Kawakubo’s elevation of the bag lady to a new ideal must have sent a shiver down the spines of those powerful elites who adhere unremittingly to the ostentatious display of Western values through wealth.1 The shock that Kawakubo’s fashion provoked was not primarily social shock, however. Her aesthetic is not principally the aesthetic of poverty, even if this contributes to its provocative impact: it is a negative aesthetic, an examination of our idea of fashion itself. As Harold Koda has shown, it is influenced by the ascetic ideal of Zen Buddhism, which evolved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in opposition to the protocol, ceremony and ostentation of court life.2 It might be claimed that Kawakubo draws on the charisma and aesthetic characteristics of such religious movements, as Akiko Fukai has shown using the example of wabi-sabi, a Japanese world view based on the aesthetics of the incomplete and the faulty.3 But how Japanese is such an aesthetic? The West, too, is undoubtedly familiar with poverty or sparsity as an aesthetic category opposed to the lustre and false appearances of the vain world, instead promoting such ideals as asceticism, self-sufficiency, freedom from desire and solitude from the disruptive hustle and bustle of the world. In the French Ancien Régime, the anti-aesthetes of the Parisian religious reform movement of the seventeenth century, the Jansenists at Port-Royal, laid the foundations for an aesthetic appreciation of poverty, age and signs of wear and tear, of coldness, darkness

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and decay. It is an acknowledgement of the non-beautiful, a making legible of the traces of a truth that has been whitewashed over by the ideal of beauty, an articulation of the fallen nature and mortality of an only apparently beautiful world. According to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Western aesthetics have, since Christian times, not regarded art as the sensual representation of God’s perfection. Hegel maintained that, since the kenosis of Christ on the cross was the matrix of Romantic art – that is, art in the age of Christianity – the truth of European art lay no longer in perfect beauty but rather in the imperfect and defective. The super-sensuous perfection of the divine is necessarily missed in the perfectly beautiful.4 This division between sensual appearance and the transcendent reality of the depicted is manifested in an aesthetic of the un-ideal that becomes particularly striking in the art of the portrait. An example is the warts depicted so prominently by Piero della Francesca on the profile of Federico da Montefeltro in one of the most famous portraits of the Renaissance (1466, Uffizi Gallery, Florence). Such an aesthetic of the un-ideal individual, the defective and the imperfect also surfaced in Western fashion: Coco Chanel, for example, used cotton rib, a ‘low’ material from which workers’ clothes were made, for haute couture. Martin Margiela continued this trend and – in a dialogue with Kawakubo – took it to its peak. Thus, once again, Kawakubo’s clothes are cutting-edge not only because they embody a Japanese aesthetic but also because they enter into a dialogue with Western fashion practices as part of the realization of this aesthetic. For the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, the éroticisme of Western female fashion lies in the rhetoric of the gap: ‘Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?’5 This peekaboo voyeurism is not the rhetoric of Kawakubo, who negates the erotic tropes of Western fashion. In her clothes, the West can learn to read bodies anew: instead of the dialectic of concealing and revealing and the associated conventions of sexuality, a new sensuality emerges in the depth of layered fabrics and changing lines. Freed from Western conventions, the thoroughly sensual wit of these clothes is all the more striking. Rarely has an intercultural change of context released such an aesthetic power so suddenly. Jean Paul Gaultier wittily exposed the sexual showing-off at the heart of Western fashion. An essential part of this bravado is the division of the body into fetish-like objects and the enlargement and isolation of particular parts: breasts, waist, feet and so on. These parts of the body are then constricted in their freedom of movement to become eye-catchers, becoming accessories, exhibited in and of themselves. A whole new set of mechanics is created – how to sit down in a short, tight skirt, how to walk in high heels  –  in order to keep the tension between concealing and revealing alive. Against such an erotic staging of the body, Kawakubo posits a body that is not exhibited to

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the gaze, but rather protected, allowed to remain whole and moveable. Her work deconstructs the Western opposition between nudity and clothes, and promotes in its place a symbiosis of clothes and body. This fashion is strongly physical. It does not, however, treat the body as an object to be exhibited, but rather as something intimate. What is at stake is neither the sublimation nor the hiding away of the body, but rather a new mode of embodiment.

A dress One dress by Kawakubo can serve as an example: the evening dress from her collection for Autumn/Winter 1984–5, which picks up a theme that could not be more Western  –  that of the classical statue and, more specifically, the female torso covered in gauzy drapery. With her silks cut on the bias, the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet (1876–1975) came closest to making this classicist ideal reality in the twentieth century. The body shimmered as promisingly through the folds of her fabric as it did through the apparently effortlessly worked marble of the ancients. Kawakubo’s evening dress, however, strikes at the core of the Greek inheritance and all subsequent classicisms. It exemplifies her disturbing reinterpretation, her taking apart and reconfiguring of the fashion system. A signature piece, the now over 25-yearold dress embodies her poetics and can be read as a pars pro toto for the strategies she subsequently developed. Through a defamiliarizing reading of classical antiquity, it is a skilful and witty commentary on the ideal of veiling the body and, thus, on one of the central tenets of Western eroticism: the tension between nudity and concealment. For Kawakubo does not veil the body: she wraps it up; she packages it. By rewriting the Western history of classicism, she reveals the relationship between the nude, the naked and the dressed in a new light. (See Figure 2.1.) Kawakubo’s evening gown displays in great style her characteristic nearaggressive modesty, which to the superficial gaze might be mistaken for mere raggedness. Our expectations of an evening dress are systematically rebuffed. The very idea of a ‘civilized’ dress is slapped in the face. It should be remembered that, until the 1980s, the length of a skirt, measured to the nearest centimetre, was perhaps the most important feature of the seasonal change in fashion. To be considered fashionable, it was absolutely crucial to have the correct length of skirt. But to speak of a dress length here would be frivolous. The seam is asymmetrical, tapering to points. The principle of the seam is taken up again in the collar, which is similarly asymmetrical, tapering triangularly at the front and in more rectangular fashion at the back. The gown is also made from the ‘wrong’ fabric and is the ‘wrong’ colour: rather than

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FIGURE 2.1   Madeleine Vionnet. Silk crêpe romaine pyjamas, c. 1931. being cut from a shimmering, supple, colourful material or from elegant black silk, it is of charcoal-grey, fine-knot wool jersey – a material in which to work, not party. But that is not the worst of it. The dress appears to be made from two pieces, since above the tunic undergarment the fabric lies in horizontal folds. It has been created from the fusion of two classical types. The strong emphasis of the line underneath the buttocks, which defines the lower limit of the torso, is characteristic of a particular type of Aphrodite figure, known to archaeologists as the Venus Anadyomene, whose naked upper body emerges from drapes of fabric. The other type that the dress evokes is the Roman goddess Ceres, typically depicted wearing a doubled cloth himation with horizontal drapery over the torso and vertical drapery on the lower body, her leg carefully posed with the knee pressing forward from under the fabric. But Kawakubo’s drapery does not let anything shine through. This brings us to the worst. (See Figure 2.2.)

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FIGURE 2.2   Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garçons. Twist, Silk and Jersey collection, Autumn/Winter 1984–5.

Western classicisms of all kinds are given a rough time by Kawakubo’s evening dress. It mocks the sex appeal of Western clothes. In Kawakubo’s work, the torso, which emerges naked in the Anadyomene, is emphasized by the dynamic spiral of the upward movement of the fabric. Yet Kawakubo’s dress does not allow any flesh to shimmer seductively through: it wraps the body. Thus the art of classic European tailoring, with its focus on elaborate revealing and veiling, is skilfully surpassed to achieve the opposite result. Through a completely new technique of drapery on the body, with invisible seams and stitching, gravity is outwitted. This technique holds the fabric in place; it cannot swirl around the body. Where, in antiquity, high art was

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demonstrated by the ability to create the effect of textiles in marble and stone, here the quality of the work is shown in the textile imitation of stone; the transformation of stone into veils is undone through a petrifaction of the fabric. The dress thus deliberately and satirically subverts the eminently classical theme of the sheer veil. In this way, Kawakubo brings the dialectic of stone and flesh to its climax. Her dress becomes stone so that, instead of stiffening into a classical marble statue, the body, naked under its wrappings, is allowed to come alive. Paradoxically, this technique of wrapping the body in stone releases it from its marble nudity, making it warm, mobile and sensual  –  naked under the drapery. By setting aside the old notion of sex appeal, Kawakubo creates a new eroticism that is at least partly the product of the freedom of movement enjoyed by women in this dress in contrast to the classic evening dress. The woman is no longer a passive exhibition piece and can, comme des garçons, do karate or leap into a taxi while still maintaining her allure. The empire has designed back – with a vengeance. Excerpt from Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Centre, London, 2010.

Notes 1 See Rei Kawakubo, ‘The Top 25’, W, 2–9 December 1983, p. 61. 2 Harold Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, Dress 11, 1985, pp. 5–10. 3 Akiko Fukai, ‘Le Japon et la mode’, in Marie-Pierre Foissy-Aufrère (ed.), XXième CIEL: Mode en Japon, Musée des Arts Asiatiques, Nice, 2003, pp. 22–3. 4 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Walther, Stuttgart, 1968. 5 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Blackwell, London, 1990, pp. 9–10.

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3 Rei Kawakubo as a retail format pioneer Karinna Grant and Kat Duffy

Introduction The Comme des Garçons (CDG) kachikan (sense of values) goes into everything the brand does. It has to be new and it has to be creative: ‘We are always forward looking, always evolving.’1 This quote reinforces the notion that creativity is the key pillar of CDG brand values, and this is also core to their retail strategy. The aim of this chapter is to examine the form and function of the brand’s unique approach to their retail distribution and store development strategy. Rei Kawakubo, together with her business partner and life partner Adrian Joffe, have over the last forty years created an evolving retail ecosystem. It is this, coupled with product design innovation and well-considered brand extensions and collaborations, that have ensured CDG maintains its position as a leader and disruptor in the highly competitive fashion marketplace. Its retail brand ecosystem consists of a variety of retail formats within its 230-store portfolio, from pocket shops and flagships to guerrilla stores and its iconic Dover Street Market (DSM) concept. In many of these, Kawakubo and Joffe have been pioneers, being the first luxury brand to experiment or twist the rules of established retail strategies. In doing so they have been completely true to their brand ethos. In a rare Wall Street Journal interview in 2011, Kawakubo states that the brand is ‘about finding new ways to do things, not only with clothes but also with retail strategies’.2 Susannah Frankel notes that risk-taking has always been this particular brand’s modus operandi,3 and indeed the brand’s motto is ‘expect the unexpected’.

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Jonathan Reynolds et al. define a retail format as the ‘physical embodiment of a retail business model: the framework that relates the firm’s activities to its business context and strategy’.4 The material environment and the notion of design are therefore central to the concept of a retail format. Kawakubo demonstrates a commitment to a holistic design process, ensuring that there is a singular vision across each touchpoint of the brand, from product to stores, advertising and graphic design. However, this is not undertaken in isolation, as it is the partnership between Joffe and Kawakubo that is undoubtedly the critical success factor in the brand’s development, with Joffe supplying his wife with stimuli from around the world and helping translate her creative vision into an operational and commercially successful reality. It is relevant to note here that the retail format also has a positioning role, playing an operational function in determining both the purchasing requirements (i.e. stock) and the production management model (i.e. sourcing and replenishment) for a store. From a strategy perspective, successful formats can and do emerge from structured business models. Often, however, winning formats can also materialize from an opportunistic and incremental process, based more on intuition than rational analysis. The CDG brand fits into this more organic method, with Kawakubo being known for looking at the ‘anti-’ version of what the rest of the market is doing, thereby adopting an anti-establishment approach. Reynolds et al. conclude that retail formats have limited lives without continued attention, thus supporting a life-cycle approach that is demonstrated by CDG. This chapter will first explore the flagship concept and will introduce and apply the concept of ‘third place’ to the brand. Then the guerrilla store format will be discussed. The final section will explain and critique the multi-brand lifestyle concept that is DSM, thereby resulting in a thorough journey through the dynamic CDG retail ecosystem. Table 3.1 outlines the key milestones of each concept by geographical location in chronological order.

Flagship stores In order to analyse the effectiveness of the flagship strategy of CDG, it is useful first to understand its generic background and main characteristics. The roots of the luxury flagship store format were in the couture ateliers of Paris around the 1900s where the designer’s collections would be produced and all the key functions of the brand would be housed.5 The next significant development was the birth of the ‘concept store’ in the 1960s. This was driven

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TABLE 3.1   Timeline and Location of the First Occurrence of Each Retail Format Concept. Boutique Flagship Guerrilla Store

DSM

Pocket Shop

Trading Good Museum Design Shop

1975 Tokyo 1983 New York 1999

Aoyama, Tokyo

2004

Berlin, London Barcelona

2006 2007

Beirut

2008

Glasgow, LA

2009 Hong Kong

Hong Kong

2010

Seoul

Tokyo Tokyo Beijing

Singapore

Tokyo

Berlin, London

2011 Singapore 2012 Berlin 2013 2014

New York London

2015 2016

Paris Singapore

by the democratization of fashion, and was particularly evident in Milan and London where smaller-scale retail stores or ‘concept stores’ had an innovative design focus. These retail outlets were experiential in nature as a result of their aesthetic focus but were small in terms of size. Moving into the economic boom period of the 1980s, Western store formats within grew larger as retail brands extended into a number of different product categories such as homewear. This created the need for new retail terminology – the ‘lifestyle store’.6 In the 1990s these stores evolved and rebranded into what we speak of today as ‘flagship stores’. These were characterized as larger than average, in a prominent retail location, and sold a wide and deep variety of products. During the 2000s, the luxury sector saw the emergence of the ‘uber-’ or ‘mega-flagship’, a format whereby each key store dimension was enhanced to be even bigger, better and more memorable.7 More recently, the luxury brands sector, which has

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been slow to embrace the digital revolution, has been focused on translating the flagship concept online with its e-commerce offerings. The first CDG store opened in Aoyama in Tokyo in 1989, and Kawakubo designed every single fixture and piece of furniture in the store. Nowadays the stores are produced collaboratively between Kawakubo and interior designer Takao Kawasaki. Kawakubo has also worked with award-winning architecture firm Future Systems. Kawakubo and Joffe understand the concept of freshness and relevance, and they update their flagship stores every five to seven years in order to ensure that their hard-core fans, or ‘fundamentalists’ as Joffe calls them, have a haven that stimulates them. This spurs Joffe and Kawakubo to create an ‘even stronger, even more forward-looking store’.8 There are six main characteristics of luxury fashion flagship stores, and Figure 3.1 illustrates these as synthesized from research by Robert Kozinets et  al., Christian Mikunda, Christian Moore and Anne Marie Docherty, Gini Fringis, and Karinna Nobbs [Grant] et al. Each will be discussed in turn as it applies to the CDG brand.

FIGURE 3.1   The characteristics of a luxury fashion flagship store.

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Size and location Flagship stores are larger-format stores, and are stereotypically found on the most prestigious streets. However, a small portion enjoy an ‘attentiongrabbing alternative’ in fringe areas that add ‘frisson’.9 CDG falls into this latter category as their flagship stores are often found not on the most obvious or most expensive street, and there is an element of discovery on the part of the consumer to find them for the first time. This adds an allure and an intellect to the brand identity.

Distribution hierarchy Generally, flagship stores should offer the broadest and most in-depth product selection. In order to add value they should also stock exclusive ranges that are not available in any other location. This is the case with CDG flagships, which generally stock the main lines and diffusion lines. The New York flagship also stocks brands and accessories from other designers, which are personally chosen by Joffe.

Enhanced design and visual merchandising Moore and Docherty note that CDG’s flagship stores are characterized by ‘rampant individuality and experimentation’, and this directs the architectural language and design aesthetic of their flagships.10 Kawakubo says today that her earliest memories of fashion as a child are of ‘navy and white and polka dots’.11 This is interesting, as the polka dot motif features heavily in her collections and also in the store fixtures and in the exterior of the Aoyama flagship store. Future Systems collaborated on the iconic store, which has a curved glass polka-dot store front, which creates a pixilated effect. Bonnie English suggests that the design approach is highly self-reflexive, insofar as this means that the customers inside appear to be moving across a television screen like actors on a set, therefore reinforcing the notion of consumerism.12 The first flagship store in Hong Kong took the anti-establishment concept to a new level, in a world in which the luxury fashion sector is being criticized for its ubiquity and adoption of a white-box approach. Kawakubo and Joffe created there the ultimate white box in their original flagship in On Lan Street. Described by Tony Kent and Riva Brown as austere and architectural, it is windowless with an all-white interior.13 Typically, CDG flagship stores are quite recognizable by their white and minimalist interiors.

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Many CDG flagship stores share another signature feature in that their entrance is quite hidden and usually features a tunnel-type structure that transports the mind and body between two worlds. As mentioned earlier, the notion of discovery is key for a Kawakubo store, from the tunnel entrance-way to segmented sections that encourage the customer to explore the store on their own personal journey. Furthermore, the fixtures and fittings inside the stores are a mixture of found objects that have been repurposed, such as industrial racks, warehouse tables and refrigerators. The recently refurbished London Flagship in Chelsea has been described by the Retail Design blog as an ‘uber-chic funhouse which represents the purest expression of the brand’s essence and values’.14

Third space Allegra Strategies and Nobbs [Grant] et  al. suggest that an important differentiating dimension of a flagship store is its ‘third space’ and organization of cultural events and experiential elements within it.15 This concept is discussed in detail in the following section, but it is highly applicable to the CDG flagship stores, as culture and experience are core to Kawakubo’s design strategy. For example, in August 2010 CDG opened a 19,000 square foot (1,800 square metres), six-level flagship store in Seoul, South Korea, which featured a branded art-exhibition space. This is a perfect example of third space. The link between art and fashion is crucial in CDG’s flagship stores as there are frequently feature spaces for art installations, and this provides a unique consumption experience for the customer.

Unique management structure As a result of their unique status within a firm and the increased pressure on standards and performance, many flagship stores operate a differentiated management structure in terms of operations, sales and visual merchandising. CDG follow a flatter hierarchy than other retailers with the store manager playing a vital role in directing the product mix and visual appeal in collaboration with head office.

Strategic function The operational function of a flagship store is to sell products and to be a commercial success and generate profit, and it is clear that CDG’s flagship stores do that with Vikram Kansara reporting revenues of over $220 million per year for the company as a whole.16 However, while there is no clear

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consensus as to what the ultimate objective of a flagship store should be, it does play an important role in the retailer’s strategies to represent the brand’s identity, values and philosophy, internally and externally. This is evident with respect to CDG because of its unique visual identity and level of control and detail, which is derived from Kawakubo’s vision.

Third space Marketing discussion of retail stores as ‘non-places’17 highlights the fact that they are lacking in social interaction, which leads to the development of commercial settings as ‘experience driven’ and as ‘places for co-creation’.18 In conceptualizing the retail space as a ‘playspace’ and an ‘artscape’, the branding of physical sites as experience spaces has formed part of the logic of experience-based value creation.19 Marked by principles of hedonism and sensation-rich experiences, DSM contains a space whereby the consumer agency is dialectical, as consumers are invited to construct and co-create in the retail space. Part of this opportunity for consumer involvement is located in the predominant use of the ‘third space’ by the overall CDG retail strategy. Third space has been identified as an important and differential element of the flagship retail format and is defined by Mikunda as ‘somewhere that is not work or home but a comfortable space to browse, relax and meet people, even enjoy a meal’.20 Ray Oldenburg speaks of the importance of third spaces to communities in allowing an informal public life. He defines them as ‘places apart from the home (first space) and workplace (second space) where individuals can freely gather, exchange ideas and socialise’.21 In order to understand the evolution of third space, it is necessary to look at the history of retailing generally, which can be divided into three phases. Basic stores at the beginning of structured commerce were small and dark; merchandise was logically organized, stacked for example, without aesthetic consideration. After the birth of the department store concept in the mid-1800s we saw a second phase, whereby there was a shift to a theatrical, elegant presentation of merchandise. The third phase of retailing sees the introduction of dynamic ideas and of open spaces: empty, flexible and multi-use. Space is strategically set aside for leisure, or for activities that depart from traditional shopping. As David Mullane comments, this use of third space provides an energy to the retail space and an opportunity to complement the fashion product with spaces for enriching the consumer experience: ‘Lifestyle catering is a big part of the strategy of bringing people to a space … It brings life into the retail store that wouldn’t be there. I think it is a brilliant idea.’22

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There are four main types of third space evident within fashion retail; these can be seen in Figure 3.2. They scale from bottom to top in terms of both complexity and risk. At the lowest level there is seating, which in a basic physical way is a visual encouragement to sit down and increase the amount of dwell time spent in the store. Seating is evident at all the different types of CDG stores, apart from the pocket shop, where the emphasis is speed and efficiency. The seating at the flagship stores is varied and well considered, as it is integrated within the broader architectural and interior design vision and features in the fitting rooms, footwear areas and cafes. The next type of third space is the inclusion of culture in the form of art or showcasing products that tell of the heritage of the brand. Thomas Crow theorizes that visual art is the research and development division of contemporary culture, aptly recognizing the process whereby the aesthetics and attitudes of contemporary art are incorporated into the commercial mainstream, that is, retail.23 Kawakubo does this most explicitly in the Trading Museum format in Tokyo, where display cases borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London house a curated selection of archival and made-to-measure pieces from a variety of carefully chosen designers. And in Seoul, the flagship has a space called ‘Gallery Six’, which again is a carefully curated art space. The next type of third space is related to food and drink, and here CDG chooses to partner with French mini-chain Rose Bakery – perhaps not coincidentally, Rei is married to the founder Rose Carrarini’s brother. The most complex variety of third space is reserved for differentiated services like tattoo parlours or pet grooming salons, but this is not something that CDG has invested in to date. There are three main reasons a brand would adopt third space: functional, symbolic and experiential. There is also the further use of third space to educate stakeholders about the heritage of the brand through in-store exhibitions. Luxury brands by means of third space establish and legitimize

FIGURE 3.2   Types of third space.

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hierarchies and reproduce privilege in that they show themselves able to keep an expensive space open for reasons other than selling to the public. Third spaces are ‘being spaces’ or what we would term ‘possibility spaces’, which offer a refuge from conventional commerciality, a diffusion of the point of attention and intention. According to Foucault, heterotopias are spaces of ‘otherness’, in which alternative forms of social organization take place, forms that stand in contrast to their surrounding environment whereby participants seek to reclaim and beautify the non-places within cities.24 Whilst the concept of utopia envisages a state of future perfection, heterotopia is located in the here and now. Kevin Hetherington suggests that, almost like laboratories, heterotopias ‘can be taken as the sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried out’.25 As a site of heterotopic convergence, the spatial vocabulary of DSM merges the industrial, commercial and creative, and is marked as different by the materiality, social practices and events contained therein, with the spaces challenging and resisting existing social orderings and retail understandings.

Guerrilla/pop-up stores In 2004 Kawakubo continued her famously deconstructivist strategy with a new retail format concept, the guerrilla store. This store format was created in order to sell end-of-line and discounted goods. Described by Guy Trebay as ‘Kawakubo’s ultimate innovation in concept retailing’, he goes on to note that Kawakubo was inspired by Nicholas Bourriaud, who has made a career of flogging the idea of cultural production with a built-in expiration date.26 The positioning of the pop-up format is key, with the temporary store as a manifestation of fluidity in retail distribution, or the liquid society. The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (beauty in decay), English notes, is also evident in the store format evolution.27 Pop-up stores can also be referred to as ‘temporary’, ‘guerrilla’, ‘flash retail’ or ‘nomad’ stores. A synthesis of communicating and selling, the first brand credited with starting the pop-up phenomenon was an LA-based company called Vacant, which in 1999, after observing consumers queuing in Japan for limited-edition products, was inspired to buy and curate exclusive products in small quantities and sell them at a unique location in London for a month, closing the store after the goods had sold out. Vacant opened their second pop-up store in New York in 2003 with the tag line ‘Is it a store? or is it a gallery?’, thus exposing the dualfunctional nature of the store.28 However, it is Kawakubo and CDG who is widely credited with making the concept popular in 2004 by creating a series of ‘anticoncept’ concept stores (which they called ‘guerrilla stores’). These were so

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called because they were open for a year, had an artistic store interior and were located in raw urban yet-to-be gentrified areas. Challenging retail conventions in the search for radicalism and revolution, the pop-up spaces of CDG must be understood or categorized in relation to what they are clearly not, which is the predictable, sanitized and controlled environment of the shopping mall and luxury store. These stores were low budget, with the first two costing only 3,000 euros. They were also low risk and served as a way to reduce inventory costs, and old merchandise could be showcased as being ‘transeasonal’. What is interesting about this unconventional retail model was the stock: CDG chose out of season (or old) stock, effectively using the store as a means of reducing inventory. Adopting this approach increased the value of the stock and changed its meaning from old to exclusive. There was also a maximum limit of $2,000 that consumers could spend in the store, taking the guerrilla concept to the fullest of levels. As Mullane says with regard to the last United Kingdom guerrilla store in Glasgow: The space here is quirky and beautiful and they gave me the last guerrilla store. They are very serious about what they do (as a company), but they make decisions based on what they think is right, what they feel is right and they back these decisions. So when the guerrilla store was over, I went to Paris to speak to them and they said they had the ‘new generation stores’ as a mechanism to carry on. We were the third new generation store.29 Also in 2004, trend agency Trendwatching.com tracked the ‘pop-up retail’ trend, highlighting it as a global movement seen at all levels of the market. In 2005, the trend trickled across to other industries, like leisure (food and beverage brands) and the automotive. Most academic studies consider it as an alternative retail format or the ‘latest expression of innovative solutions in marketing channels’.30 The pop-up format is seen as a legitimate and innovative way of connecting with customers and extending brands. However, there has since been an increasing transition from pop-up to other retail formats, with the concept increasingly criticized for being ubiquitous. Indeed, the most recent incarnation of the pop-up store has been online, with digital pop-up stores being trialled (with mixed success) by Rachael Roy, Bvlgari and H&M. (See Figure 3.3.)

Time The most common characteristic, and the pop-up store’s definitive facet, is the non-permanent (temporary) or short-term nature of the store. It is an ‘expression of a new social and economic dynamic’.31 This characteristic of

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FIGURE 3.3   The characteristics of a fashion pop-up store.

ephemerality extends to the consumer relationship with the store, insofar as the temporality of the format exerts a pressure on the consumer of fragmented time, and this temporality impacts on consumers’ information processing. Each CDG store was open no longer than one year. The reason is that they expected the area to change and lose its underground cool appeal. Joffe states: ‘You could say that the more successful we are, the more we will want to move.’32

Size and location Finally, location is critical. Kim and Gaynor Lea-Greenwood both highlight that ‘un-typical to the brand’ size or geographic location strategies are characteristic of pop-up stores.33 The most comprehensive definition of the pop-up is proposed by Niehm et al., as it includes each of these aspects and also mentions the dual marketing/retail role of a pop-up as a ‘new experiential marketing format intended to engage consumers. It is a short-term promotional/ retail setting designed to offer an exclusive and highly experiential interaction

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for the consumer.’34 The store is sourced in an up-and-coming location and the brand enters into a partnership with a manager who lives locally to operate the store on a sale or return basis, ensuring a low risk. English notes that the locations must be historic, have character and not be near commercial areas.35 This is interesting as it is the anti-model of traditional retail location theory and practice.

Design and experience and interactivity Linda Niehm, Hye-Jeong Kim and Harriet Posner all note that the atmosphere and environment of the store should generate engagement and excitement with the consumer.36 The pop-up format gives brands a physical presence, providing a tangible experience to enrich customer relationship-building and an experiential marketing platform. As Joffe says: It was more a PR thing than making money. It didn’t really make money for the partners … The idea was to propose to the local population an array of interesting and creative merchandise in a new way that is not beholden to the seasons or other industry dictates and where what counts is the choice of goods and the spirit and the energy rather than the appearance of carefully designed interiors.37

Viral promotion The guerrilla aspect was also evident in the promotional approach. CDG used fly posters (only 600) to let the information pass by word of mouth. This was pre-social networking, which is now an essential medium for viral promotion and pop-up promotional strategy.

Dover Street Market The luxury multi-brand lifestyle concept store is a particular breed, and it affords parallels to such examples as Carla Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como in Milan, Sarah Andelman at Colette in Paris, Opening Ceremony in New York and IT in China and Hong Kong. Described by Jacques Hyzagi as CDG’s most innovative concept to date, DSM is an intelligent and creative fashion department store that is as much an art gallery as a store. (See Figure 3.4.)38 DSM was created to be an antithesis to traditional department stores, which Joffe describes as formulaic, and this impulse relates to every part of the retail

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FIGURE 3.4   Dover Street Market, London. Exterior view of shop by night. marketing mix from the music to the store staff, with the general manager of New York having the directive to find people who were ‘the more eccentric, the better’.39 The DSM concept features all the CDG brands (now totalling fifteen) and a list of other designers, both established and emerging, who are showcased in their own individual spaces and who often create exclusive ranges. The London and New York stores partner with the cult French bakery Rose Bakery, and each DSM concept has an ‘incubation’ area that is reserved for young and emerging designers, and in New York they also have an ‘Energy Showroom’ to highlight dynamic early-career talent. The core value of DSM is to ‘share a space with people with vision, people who have something to say’.40 DSM represents the synergy that underpins the wider retail strategy, with the combination of Joffe’s commercial instincts and Rei’s provoking, creative insights: Rei is very involved in DSM, most particularly from the visual and design point of view as well as the overall concept. She designs the overall architecture, common areas, general brand areas and all CDG brand spaces … But all [major] decisions, such as who to invite, who and what to buy, are made by me, with my teams.41

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FIGURE 3.5   Dover Street Market, London. View of womenswear with Marc Newson chairs in foreground. With the ‘deconstructed department store’42 aesthetic of DSM taking its creative direction from Kawakubo, the retail space showcases captured moments that are transported in space and time: hotel rooms recreated and disrupted as merchandise displays, Portaloos as fitting rooms and huts serving as stockrooms and register points. (See Figure 3.5.) The role of curation at DSMs is paramount: ‘The space at DSM brings brands of all disciplines together to sell their products in an open atmosphere that, most importantly, incites creativity.’43 The retail format of DSM is centred on depicting a notion of ‘beautiful chaos’, with the premise of a constantly changing and shifting product and visual merchandising disrupting the security and safety of a conventional use of the store space. The visual merchandising of the space is part of its differential charm. There is a bi-annual ‘tachiagari’ (beginning), during which time the store is closed for three days and the store is re-dressed and reconfigured with fresh designer collections and installations. Closing the store to allow for this change is unconventional in today’s twenty-fourhour ‘always on’ retail environment. For DSM New York, Kawakubo wanted to keep the ‘no-rule, beautiful chaos’ feeling of the first two. She aimed to create a contrast with the city itself and design with ‘extreme simplicity, unsophisticated, almost primitive with naïve artlessness’.44 Kawakubo shunned the traditional department store model, which separates by category, gender and age. Also important was the transparent elevator, which she designed in order to make the whole shop as it is one shop – one total experience. In bridging the art–commerce–retail worlds, DSM evokes a dynamism around

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the retail space of constant reinvention and reinvigoration, deconstruction and reconstruction. This concept is also profitable, rumoured to have made 13 million pounds of profit in 2015. The location of these stores, as with the flagships and pop-ups, is particularly well considered. CDG has a history of daring to open in unexpected, even hidden, spaces, some of which have brought entire neighbourhoods back to fashionable life  –  for example, the Aoyama area of Tokyo and Murray Hill in New York. Suzy Menkes states that Kawakubo has an ‘exceptional sense of place’, with each location she chooses globally becoming a ‘hot-spot’ in a short space of time.45 This is evident in the stores placed in Aoyama, SoHo, Chelsea and Mayfair. Having been first responsible for transforming the Mayfair area, DSM moved out of the main luxury-retail thoroughfare to the previous Burberry Headquarters in Haymarket in 2016. An ironic move, as it will no longer be in the street of its namesake. However, Kawakubo and Joffe chose this new site to be three times larger than the original one, and again its positioning amongst the tacky souvenir stores is itself unexpected and ‘on-brand’. The intertextuality of the collections of CDG is also tangible in its retail spaces, as a metaphorical call to arms against the standardization and homogenization of the retail store. The DSM project aims to challenge our preconceptions of what fashion retail may or may not be, with Kawakubo opting, in typically idiosyncratic style, for a more organic (and far less expensive) process, one that aims to entice the customer through experimentation and innovation rather than blinding them with excess. Marketing and retail literature has long explored the metaphor of the store as theatre and the theatrical experience of the store, with consumers removed from everyday life and transported to an environment designed to evoke a unique aesthetic experience.46 With DSM set against the archetype of the marketplace, designers and creatives augment the space with installations and visual merchandising that subvert notions of luxury retail and are unorthodox in their use of the architecture to problematize the consumer retail journey. The London store is deliberately challenging to navigate as it was previously an office space and has only one small elevator and a concrete stairwell. Architectural interventions and interior design as such are dispensed with. Kawakubo is working with theatre and film scenographers to create various backgrounds and atmospheres that will change regularly. These will interact with the spaces of each creator in an accidental and synergistic manner. DSM is described by business journalist Christopher Bagley as a ‘multi-brand mecca that’s part fashion emporium, part group art installation and part Pee-wee’s Playhouse’.47 (See Plate 1 in colour insert.) Set out almost as a voyage of discovery, the built environment of DSM challenges retail formats and showcases innovative ways to engage with consumers. The spatial setting and aesthetic structuring of DSM employs a range of expressive artefacts as key components in the construction and

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communication of the DSM experience. The spatial design of DSM propels consumers through the store and provides opportune moments for discovery and imagination alongside multisensory stimulation. As Nicky Gregson et al. articulate, retail space is ‘brought into being, orchestrated, performed in interaction and, as negotiated, is accepted, resisted and interpreted by both consumers and shop attendants’.48 With Kawakubo as the conductor and composer of the CDG orchestra, the spatio-temporal construction of DSM pulls on numerous often conflicting vocabularies in its industrial, commercial and creative convergence: ‘I want to create a market where people from all walks of life can encounter each other in an atmosphere of beautiful chaos … the coming together of kindred souls.’49 This statement is the antithesis of conventional consumption-led retail. One final notable function of the DSM format is that Kawakubo and Joffe created it also as a distribution platform opportunity that is not often offered by traditional department stores and multi-brand retailers. As Joffe explains: ‘We wanted it to be a store that can directly and indirectly give courage to young designers and luxury brands alike to pursue the path of creation and freedom, and encourage individual anticorporate expression.’50

Online The CDG website was launched in 2011, which is relatively late in comparison to other luxury brands. In fact, this is one area where the brand could be criticized for not being as inventive in relation to the brand ethos of offering something unexpected. There has been some experimentation with the DSM e-commerce platform, and the expansion of the online product offering is more evident each year. However, Kawakubo wants to take her time with technology as she doesn’t feel it yet and believes the clothes need to be touched.51

Summary This chapter has documented the variety and differentiation of CDG’s retail distribution approaches, and it can be stated that for a luxury brand, even for a luxury fashion brand, Kawakubo and Joffe are true retail pioneers. They must be commended for being as commercially as they are creatively brave. In particular this is for their integration of third space into their flagship stores, the birth of the guerrilla store format and the change of business model from single brand to multi-brand with the Dover Street Market formats.

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In conclusion, the central creative vision of Kawakubo combined with the complimentarily business-focused yet still creative Joffe is what makes the CDG brand and its retail strategy unique in the marketplace. Although Suzy Menkes suggests that it is Rei who is the central point of the ecology: ‘Without Rei, CDG would not exist in its present form … without her constant pushing and urging to go forward and find new things and new ideas.’52 And Kawakubo herself highlights the notion of a truly integrated creative retail identity in her statement: ‘It is true to say that I “design” the company not just clothes.’53

Notes 1 Adrian Joffe cited in Vikram Kansara, ‘Adrian Joffe, Tending the Garden of Comme des Garçons’, The Business of Fashion, 18 September 2013 (http:// www.businessoffashion.com/articles/people/adrian-joffe-rei-kawakubotending-the-garden-of-comme-des-garcons) accessed 25 September 2021. 2 Anon., ‘Rei Kawakubo’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2011 (https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903918104576500263503794504) accessed 10 October 2021. 3 Susannah Frankel, ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion’s Greatest Iconoclast’, Dazed, September 2004 (http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/26740/1/reikawakubo-fashion-s-great-iconoclast) accessed 30 August 2021. 4 Jonathan Reynolds, Elizabeth Howard, Christina Cuthbertson and Latchezar Hristov, ‘Perspectives on Retail Format Innovation: Relating Theory and Practice’, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management 35(8), 2007, p. 648. 5 Mark Tungate, Fashion Brands: Branding Styles from Armani to Zara, Kogan Page, London, 2008. 6 Neil Bingham, The New Boutique, Merrell Publishers, London, 2005. 7 Lucy Greene, ‘Flagship Armada’, Financial Times, 28 September 2011, p. 7 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e61faf54-e92f-11e0-af7b-00144feab49a. html#axzz1aVrfpluI) accessed 25 September 2021. 8 Suzi Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, New York Times, 6 December 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/t-magazine/rei-kawakubo-doverstreet-market.html) accessed 30 August 2021. 9 Bingham, The New Boutique, n. 6, p. 46. 10 Christopher Moore and Anne Marie Docherty, ‘The International Flagship Stores of Luxury Fashion Retailers’, in Tony Hines and Margaret Bruce (eds), Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Butterworth, Oxford, 2001, pp. 278–96. 11 Cited in Frankel, ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion’s Greatest Iconoclast’, n. 3. 12 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Berg, London, 2011, p. 86.

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13 Tony Kent and Reva Brown, Flagship Marketing: Concepts and Places, Routledge, London, 2009. 14 ‘Comme des Garçon’s Flagship Store by Rei Kawakubo, London’, Retail Design Blog, 4 February 2014 (http://retaildesignblog.net/2014/02/04/ comme-des-garcons-flagship-store-by-rei-kawakubo-london/) accessed 30 August 2021. 15 Allegra Strategies, Project Flagship: Flagship Stores in the UK, Allegra Strategies Limited, London, 2005; and Karinna Nobbs [Grant], Christopher Moore and Mandy Sheridan, ‘Luxury Fashion Brand Strategy: The Role of the Flagship Store’, International Review of Retail and Distribution Management 40(12), 2012, pp. 920–34. 16 Adrian Joffe cited in Kansara, ‘Adrian Joffe, Tending the Garden’, n. 1. 17 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, New York, 1995. 18 Robert Kozinets, ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities’, Journal of Marketing Research 39(1), 2002, pp. 61–72. 19 Stephen Brown and Pauline McLaren, ‘The Center Cannot Hold: Consuming the Utopian Marketplace’, Journal of Consumer Research 32(2), 2005, pp. 311–23. 20 Christine Mikunda, Brand Lands, Hot Spots & Cool Spaces, Kogan Page, London, 2004. 21 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts in the Heart of a Community, Paragon House, New York, 1999. 22 Katherine Duffy interview with David Mullane, New Generation Store, Glasgow, February 2016. 23 Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996. 24 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16(1), Spring 1986, pp. 22–7. 25 Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Routledge, London, 1997. 26 Guy Trebay, ‘Fashion Diary: Making a Surreal Trip onto a Nightclub Runway’, New York Times, 4 March 2005 (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/ nyregion/fashion-diary-making-a-surreal-trip-onto-a-nightclub-runway.html) accessed 10 October 2021. 27 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 12, p. 87. 28 Andreas Tzortis, ‘Pop-up Stores, Here Today and Gone Tomorrow’, New York Times, 25 October 2004 (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/business/ worldbusiness/24ihtpopups25.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) accessed 30 August 2021. 29 Duffy interview with Mullane, February 2016, n. 22. 30 Fabio Musso, ‘Innovation in Marketing Channels: Relationships, Technology, Channel Structure’, Symphonya: Emerging Issues in Management 1, 2010, pp. 23–42.

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31 Mi Surchi, ‘The Temporary Store: A New Marketing Tool for Fashion Brands’, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 15(2), 2011, pp. 257–70. 32 Joffe cited in Frankel, ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion’s Greatest Iconoclast’, n. 3. 33 Hye-Jeong Kim, Hye-Jeong Kim, Ann Marie Fiore, Linda S. Niehm and Miyoung Jeong, ‘Psychographic Characteristics Affecting Behavioural Intentions towards Pop-up Retail’, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 38(2), 2010, pp.133–54; and Gaynor LeaGreenwood, Fashion Marketing Communications, Blackwell, London, 2013. 34 Linda S. Niehm, Hye-Jeong Kim, Ann Marie Fiore and Miyoung Jeong, ‘“Pop-up” Retail Acceptability as an Innovative Business Strategy and Enhancer of the Consumer Shopping Experience’, Journal of Shopping Center Research 13(2), 2007, p. 1. 35 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 12, p. 86. 36 Niehm et al., ‘“Pop-up” Retail’, n. 34 pp. 1–30; Kim et al., ‘Psychographic Characteristics’, n. 33; and Harriet Posner, Marketing Fashion, Lawrence King, London, 2011. 37 Kawakubo cited in Frankel, ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion’s Greatest Iconoclast’, n. 3. 38 Jacques Hyzagi, ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Radical Chic’, Guardian, 20 September 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/sep/20/rei-kawakubo-radicalchic) accessed 25 September 2021. 39 Christopher Bagley, ‘Behind CDG Stands Zen-Loving Contrarian CEO’, Bloomberg Markets, 8 October 2014 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2014-10-07/behind-comme-des-garcons-stands-zen-loving-contrarianceo) accessed 10 October 2021. 40 Joffe in Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8. 41 Suzy Menkes, ‘Dover Street Market Set to Move to Haymarket, Vogue, 3 December 2014 (https://vogue.globo.com/Suzy-Menkes/en/noticia/2014/12/ dover-street-market-set-move-haymarket.html) accessed 15 September 2021. 42 Bagley, ‘Behind CDG’, n. 39. 43 Kawakubo cited in Hyzagi, ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Radical Chic’, n. 38. 44 Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8. 45 Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8. 46 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York, 1959; and Alfons van Marrewijk and Maaike Broos, ‘Retail Stores as Brands: Performance, Theatre and Space’, Consumption Markets and Culture 15(4), 2012, pp. 374–91. 47 Bagley, ‘Behind CDG’, n. 39. 48 Nicky Gregson, Louise Crewe and Kate Brooks, ‘Shopping, Space and Practice’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(5), 2002, pp. 597–617. 49 Kawakubo cited in Frankel, ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion’s Greatest Iconoclast’, n. 3.

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50 Joffe in Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8. 51 ‘Adrian Joffe: The Idea of COMME des GARÇONS’, Hypebeast, 10 January 2011 (http://hypebeast.com/2011/1/adrian-joffe-the-idea-of-comme-desgarcons) accessed 21 October 2021. 52 Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8. 53 Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, n. 8.

4 Rei Kawakubo: Agent provocateur in a hyper-glamourized world Llewellyn Negrin

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rt in recent times has increasingly embraced the world of fashion and glamour. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century, the artistic avant-garde sought to distance itself from the realm of conspicuous consumption through the adoption of an anti-aesthetic stance, once it realized its own imbrication in this sphere it tended to retreat from a critical engagement with it. Rei Kawakubo, by contrast, while operating within the fashion industry, maintains a critical perspective onto its sphere. Refusing the binary logic of the artistic avant-garde, she both acknowledges the commodity status of her work at the same time as she interrogates it. Rather than pursuing the chimerical dream of totally escaping the process of commodification, as the artistic avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century sought to do, she seeks to criticize it from within, maintaining a dialectical tension with the market imperatives that govern the fashion industry. In a reversal of roles, art in recent times has increasingly embraced the techniques of visual seduction once typical of the world of fashion, while Kawakubo’s fashion seeks to question these through the adoption of an aesthetic that eschews the dazzling spectacle of consumer capitalism. In doing so, the interrogation of the commercial annexation of beauty is paradoxically kept alive in a sphere once ranked below art because of its connection to the market and the bourgeois realm of conspicuous consumption. While

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Kawakubo’s designs have become coveted commodities, at the same time they have opened up spaces for critical reflection that exceed the economic exigencies of the market.

Rei Kawakubo’s renunciation of glamour In the early 1980s, Kawakubo shocked the fashion world with her ‘pauperist’style garments redolent of the dispossessed. With their frayed hems, puckered-up seams, holes, poor-quality fabrics and asymmetrical shapes, they posed a direct challenge to high fashion’s cult of luxury and ostentation. Kawakubo’s foray into ‘poverty’ dressing first came to international attention in the early 1980s when she presented her fashion designs in Paris and with the publication of her Autumn/Winter 1982–3 Comme des Garçons collection in Vogue. These early collections featured garments that were made with fabrics that appeared old and worn, sometimes with holes in unexpected places, as exemplified by her knitted ‘lace’ sweaters that had the appearance of being moth-eaten. Reminiscent of ripped and shredded rags that had been cobbled together, her outfits seemed to be poorly made and ill-fitting. Skirts had jacket sleeves hanging from the front of them, trousers featured sweater cuffs around the ankles, while coats, jackets and dresses were over-sized and shapeless, wrapping around the body in an apparently random manner to create a dishevelled appearance. A drab palette of black, dark grey or white underlined the austerity of this style. Typically, her outfits permitted a multiplicity of ways of wearing them, with holes and sleeves in unexpected places. Rather than being tailored to fit the body, they were designed to be draped around it, with odd extrusions of extraneous appendages creating a look of apparent disarray. Her Spring/ Summer 1984 collection consisted of garments made from coarse cotton material and employed the technique of smocking, commonly used in working men’s clothing.1 As with her previous collections, the garments were not carefully tailored to fit the wearer, and the seemingly random occurrence of holes they incorporated allowed them to be worn in a range of different configurations. Teamed with shoes that resembled paddy slippers, the look was reminiscent of that of farm labourers. In other garments, Kawakubo used Japanese sashiko – a ‘poor’ technique employed by rural workers and fishermen whereby worn-out indigo work clothes are stitched together with little white running stitches to form a new garment.2 The shabby style was complemented by models who had pale and wan faces and tousled hair. At the time when Kawakubo’s ‘pauperist’ style first came into prominence, it was regarded by the fashion press as an out-and-out assault on the fashion

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world, with critics applying such derisory epithets as ‘Hiroshima chic’, ‘Fashion’s Pearl Harbour’ and ‘Japanese bag-lady look’ to her work.3 What made Kawakubo’s designs particularly confronting was that they occurred in a context where other fashion designers were beginning to engage in a hyperbolization of glamour. As the elite status of haute couture came under threat with the transition from the creation of bespoke garments to ready-to-wear during the 1960s and 1970s, a number of fashion houses responded by producing designs that were an exaggerated statement of conspicuous consumption. A case in point is Gianni Versace, who during the 1980s ‘developed the lavish, luxurious, overtly sexual style that became his trademark’.4 His fashion designs were epitomized by opulent materials and elaborate embellishments, including black leather appliquéd with velvet, rhinestones and lace, quilted satin and grey flannel doubled with shiny silk. In contrast to the muted elegance of traditional haute couture, Versace’s designs were unashamed displays of wealth and opulence. This hyper-glamourization was furthered by the staging of extravagant fashion parades that became showbusiness events that received wide publicity in the mass media, in contrast with the catwalk shows of the past that had been restricted events aimed at the fashion press, buyers and selected clients. As one journalist described them, they had ‘all the production value of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza’.5 Integral to the appeal of Versace’s shows was the phenomenon of the supermodel, which he was instrumental in creating. Unlike the anonymous ‘clothes horses’ of the past, supermodels were presented as ciphers for a distinctive individuality, attaining a celebrity status that rivalled that of film and pop stars. The ‘aura’ that they exuded served to enhance the desirability of the garments with which they were associated. Kawakubo, however, took a very different path, eschewing the ostentatious display of wealth in favour of a more austere and minimalist aesthetic. As Bonnie English points out, her embrace of motifs of poverty was indicative of a scorn for the display of status and the hierarchical value system on which haute couture was predicated.6 She describes it as an anti-consumerist gesture, stimulated by a reaction against the materialism of post-war Japan, which, after years of austerity, coveted new consumer goods from the West and rejected the old and the worn. (See Figure 4.1.) Implicit in Kawakubo’s ‘aesthetic of poverty’, as Harold Koda has pointed out, is a Japanese sensibility known as wabi-sabi, derived from Zen philosophy. As he explains it, sabi refers to an ‘aesthetic appreciation of things suggestive of age …: an aesthetic of external denial and internal refinement’, while wabi ‘embodies images of transiency, decay, a certain rusticity and … an exhortation to open all one’s senses to the poignant experience of the fleeting moment’.7 In direct contrast to the court traditions of elaboration and ornamentation, the

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FIGURE 4.1   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jacket, shirt, skirt and boots, Patchworks and X collection, Spring/Summer 1983.

wabi-sabi canon of beauty prizes the imperfect, the simple and the ephemeral, showing a respect for, and acceptance of, the effects of nature on materials. As Leonard Koren elaborates, it provides an antidote to the materialist pursuit of wealth, status and luxury through the appreciation of the modest and the humble and an awareness of the impermanence of all things as they become subject to the inexorable processes of decay and corrosion. Unlike the slick, shiny, flawless surfaces that typify the corporate style of beauty, wabi-sabi values that which is rough, irregular and displays the signs of wear.8 In keeping with this, Kawakubo treated the fabrics out of which her garments were composed to give them the appearance of being old and

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worn, by shrinking, stretching, overdyeing or bleaching them or by washing them and leaving them out in the sun to dry in a crumpled heap over several days. She also deliberately introduced flaws into her fabrics by tampering with the knitting machines used to produce them. In doing so, she challenged fashion’s fetishization of the new and the perfect, which, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, is a defence against death and decay, thus highlighting that which fashion seeks to suppress.9 Kawakubo’s design approach has been described as ‘deconstructionist’ insofar as it dismantles the norms of perfection and finish that underpin traditional haute couture and subjects them to self-reflexive examination.10 By deliberately creating garments that look unfinished through the inclusion of such elements as visible seams, zips, hems and tacking stitches, and the exposure of the inner linings of garments, she undermines the mystique attached to the tradition of skilled tailoring by revealing the process by which garments are constructed. The fact that Kawakubo has had no formal training in the tailoring of clothes is seen as a virtue in this regard since it frees her from the conventional norms of what constitutes a well-constructed garment. Kawakubo’s adoption of an anti-glamour aesthetic has been evident not only in her fashion designs but also in the design of her shop interiors. In the first Comme des Garçons store that opened in Paris in 1982, for instance, the original floor and pockmarked walls, which had been stripped of plaster, were preserved, giving the space a patina of age. Unfinished mortar was also used in a number of Kawakubo’s boutiques, producing a finish that cracked as soon as it set, leaving hairline fractures running across the floors and up the walls – a deliberate denial of formal perfection, which echoed the same philosophy as that governing her fashion designs. Her rejection of ostentation was also demonstrated in her Robe de Chambre shop in Roppongi with its planar stone and glass surfaces. The merchandise, the phone and even the clerk were concealed behind translucent panels so that the store appeared empty except for a bare table and slab on which merchandise was placed when a customer was being served. Furthermore, plain brown bags were used to wrap garments, which were then placed in carrier bags with stout twine handles.11 This eschewal of visual spectacle was a radical departure from the design aesthetic first pioneered in the department stores of the nineteenth century where, as Remy Saisselin points out, opulent displays of merchandise were integral to the incitement of desire.12 Mimicking the exhibition of objets d’arts in art museums, these sumptuous displays were designed to promote a covetousness for goods that transcended need. The invitation proffered by these stores to participate in the pleasure of looking without buying belied their ultimate purpose of stimulating consumerism.

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Kawakubo’s challenge to mainstream marketing strategies continued during the 1990s. Thus, for instance, her boutique in the Isetan department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo, was furnished very sparsely, in a manner akin to a bargain basement outlet with basic folding rectangular tables, cracked cement floors and refrigerator cabinets used as storage. In 1998, she opened a shop in the Chelsea district of New York. Situated in a nineteenth-century building in the old meatpacking district, it retained all of the existing signage and external industrial fire escapes. Clients entered through a circuitous route, which obscured the main entrance to the shop, presenting a challenge rather than an open invitation to the potential customer. (See Figure 4.2.) Her shop in Tokyo’s Minami-Aoyama district, which opened in 1999, featured a conical, curved thirty-metre expanse of street-level glass that was screenprinted with blue dots. As English describes it, ‘this created a pixilated effect from the outside with the customers appearing to be moving across a huge television screen like actors on a set’.13 Through these means, Kawakubo drew attention to the ways in which the spectacle of consumption is transformed into a hyperreal simulation by the mass media – a process whereby the image comes to substitute for the real. More recently, Kawakubo has established a chain of stores known as the Dover Street Market in London (2004), Tokyo (2012) and New York (2014), which are modelled on the ragmarkets of old. The Dover Street Market brings together a collective of like-minded artists and designers (some of whom

FIGURE 4.2   Comme des Garçons store, Chelsea, New York.

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originally sold their wares in ragmarkets), who market their creations alongside the garments produced by Kawakubo in a somewhat chaotic and constantly changing display reminiscent of the ‘energy and anarchy of good markets’, as Kawakubo describes it. Each of the Dover Street Markets occupies an old building with ‘raw’ interiors using recycled materials to give it the ambience of a bazaar.14 Kawakubo has also pioneered a new concept of retailing through her guerilla stores – a range of temporary shops set up for no longer than a year in spaces where little has been done to renovate them, located in historic areas that are set apart from any established commercial areas. Often they are in cities away from the mainstream of fashion such as Warsaw, Poland, Vilnius, Lithuania and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Here garments and accessories from past collections are offered for sale at budget prices, presenting a challenge to the basic premise of fashion as a constant turnover of styles. These stores are a further extension of Kawakubo’s desire to eschew the overt display of goods for sale as they are often hidden away in obscure areas with little advertising except word of mouth. As Sylvia Lavin describes them, they are: like nomads or squatters who adopt places as they are found … If most stores today simply make static urban monuments, Comme des Garçons is an active urbanism of stealth and evasion, where shops walk about the world like updated flâneurs who can find privacy and secrecy only when exposed and in the midst of the chaotic city.15 Similarly, in the promotion of her fashions, Kawakubo has engaged in strategies that challenge mainstream marketing techniques. From 1988 to 1991, for instance, she founded a magazine entitled Six, which consisted of images expressing her wabi-sabi aesthetic, often without any direct reference to her garments. Thus, for example, images of peasant women from Soviet Georgia were presented, offering a marked contrast to the depiction of glamorous models in exotic locations that typified much mainstream fashion advertising. Likewise, in 1994 she commissioned artist Cindy Sherman, well-known for her creation of works that subvert the ideals of feminine beauty, to produce a series of postcard images to advertise her Autumn/Winter collection. Sherman appears dressed in the guise of an odd assortment of characters, such as an elderly woman in squalid surroundings or a heavily tattooed woman with facial piercings in an apparently drug-induced stupor, directly countering the image of the supermodel who emerged as a prominent figure in the world of fashion promotion during the 1980s and 1990s. (See Plate 2 in colour insert.) In these images, the garments designed by Kawakubo are not presented in a flattering light and play a secondary role to the curious impersonations that Sherman presents.

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More recently, Kawakubo commissioned artists Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva to advertise her Spring/Summer 2010 collection. Employing the approach first adopted in their Paper Surgeries series, Shanabrook and Georgieva transformed images of beautiful fashion models into grotesquely distorted visages by twisting and crumpling magazine photographs of them. These images were then printed on T-shirts for the 2010 collection. (See Plate 3 in colour insert.) Finally, Kawakubo’s anti-aesthetic stance is also evident in the range of perfumes that her company has produced. Unlike traditional perfumes, these ‘anti-perfumes’ have unpleasant odours and are not designed to last. Her Synthetic Tar series, for instance, was based on the urban smell of town gas, bitumen and grilled cigarettes, while her Garage series featured leather, kerosene and plastic notes. The packaging of these perfumes also reflected this challenge to the association of perfume with sensuous pleasure, being vacuum-packed like coffee in a plastic sachet.

The significance of Kawakubo’s anti-aestheticism Kawakubo’s refusal of glamour takes up the mantle of the artistic avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, in a context where artists themselves have increasingly retreated from a critical appraisal of the annexation of beauty for commercial purposes. Whereas the artistic avant-garde once sought to distance itself from the bourgeois realm of luxury and conspicuous consumption through the adoption of a deliberately anti-aesthetic stance, once it realized its own imbrication in the commodity nexus there was a tendency to capitulate to this realm, foregoing the critical perspective it once had. Despite the efforts of such artists and art movements as Marcel Duchamp, the Russian Constructivists, Arte Povera and Joseph Kosuth to distinguish art from commerce through their eschewal of beauty, by the 1960s and 1970s it became increasingly clear to artists that art did not exist apart from the realm of conspicuous consumption and its cyclical rhythms, as their own works became converted into valuable commodities.16 As Theodor Adorno  –  one of the foremost advocates of the de-aestheticization of art  –  admitted, art’s attempt to distance itself from fashion at the same time harbours a fear that it, like fashion, can never totally escape the commodity nexus. Fashion makes evident the uncomfortable truth that art would rather not acknowledge – namely its inescapable commodity status. As he writes: Fashion is art’s permanent confession that it is not what it claims to be. For its indiscreet betrayals fashion is as hated as it is a powerful force

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in the system; its double character is a blatant symptom of its antinomy. Fashion cannot be separated from art as neatly as would suit bourgeois art religion. Ever since the aesthetic subject polemically distanced itself from society and its prevailing spirit, art communicates with this objective spirit, however untrue it is, through fashion.17 In an era in which fashion has become ubiquitous, invading all areas of social life, including art itself, art’s opposition to the seductive world of consumer capitalism now appeared pointless to many. No longer could it maintain the pretence that it stood apart from the realm of commerce and its constant turnover of styles. As Jean Baudrillard characterizes it, ‘fashion is at the core of modernity, extending even into science and revolution, because the entire order of modernity, from sex to the media, from art to politics, is infiltrated by its logic‘.18 Having recognized art’s ineluctable involvement in the system of conspicuous consumption, artists have increasingly succumbed to the lure of fashion, retreating from any critical engagement with it. The turning point came with Andy Warhol, who was clearly fascinated by the glamour of the fashion world. As he once declared: ‘I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re so beautiful. Everything’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.’19 Beginning his career as an illustrator for fashion magazines, his love of the glitz and shiny surfaces of this world translated into his portraits of society celebrities, which presented a depthless spectacle of cosmetically enhanced appearances. While in early works such as his Marilyn Diptych (1962) one gets a sense of a darker side behind the glitzy surface, as the glossy images of Marilyn Monroe are juxtaposed with progressively fading black-and-white images of her, his later works increasingly assimilated themselves to the hyperreal world of simulation, revelling in the seductiveness of the glossy façade, as exemplified by his Liza Minelli portrait (1979). It is perhaps no accident then that in 1991 Versace – the impresario of glamour par excellence – appropriated Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe in an evening gown that he designed, further heightening the allure of the original through the use of an intense colour palette and the inclusion of rhinestones and glass bead embroidery as a decoration. Chris Townsend traces this trajectory of art’s subsumption by fashion in his book Rapture: The Seduction of Art by Fashion. He argues that the growing rapprochement between art and fashion in recent times has been motivated in large part by art’s desire to appropriate glamour, once the exclusive domain of fashion, for itself. Artists, having grown weary of the denial of visual pleasure that was a hallmark of the avant-garde in the first part of the twentieth century, have sought to recuperate it, taking their cue from the world of fashion. Reacting against the necessity for art to be primarily a vehicle of meaning or political critique, artists attempt to recover the sensuous aspect of aesthetic

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experience. Townsend suggests that fashion, ‘with its emphasis on visual and bodily pleasure, [can serve] both as a metaphor for art’s potential meanings and a model of possible practice’.20 In his view, it can provide art with the means by which to escape the strictures of the puritanical asceticism that governed art in previous decades. He cites Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, who has elaborated further on these ideas. In his essay ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime’, Gilbert-Rolfe argues that art has been overburdened with the necessity to engage in ideological critique at the expense of its sensuous qualities. The emphasis on the conceptual elements of art has been such that artists and critics have lost sight of its corporeality, which is integral to the experience of art. This has given rise to an ‘art which does without art’, as he puts it.21 In his bid to restore the centrality of the sensuous to the experience of art, Gilbert-Rolfe takes inspiration from the glamorous world of fashion. Whereas artists in the past have been wary of falling prey to the seductive lure of fashion on the grounds of its superficiality and frivolous nature, it is precisely these features that recommend themselves to him. In his view, what makes glamour so subversive is its refusal of meaning, which enables it to evade the masculine order of logocentric reason. Glamour epitomizes the secular concept of beauty in its disassociation from the discourses of truth and morality, upholding the validity of the sensuous against puritanical attempts to suppress it through the primacy of reason. In its superfluity and apparent gratuitousness, it defies all attempts to subject it to a rationalizing discourse. As he writes: [Glamour] puts a limit on the language of force to the extent that it resists being subsumed by what frames it. This resistance is an effect created by its indifference to what is brought to it. The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it and what always frames it is discourse.22 By contrast with Kawakubo’s embrace of the imperfect and the worn, GilbertRolfe upholds the blank flawlessness of the glamorous fashion model, whose seamless beauty defies the search for meaning.23 However, what is overlooked in Gilbert-Rolfe’s championing of glamour is that it is its very qualities of frivolousness and indifference to meaning that make it so amenable to manipulation by commercial interests. Its vacuousness makes it a vehicle that can easily be harnessed for other purposes. The capacity of glamour to evade meaning, then, is both its weakness and its strength, enabling it to be employed for conservative as well as subversive purposes. It is this double-edged nature of glamour that has been downplayed by artists in recent times, as they have sought to recuperate the centrality of visual pleasure for art. In their embrace of glamour they have lost sight of the fact that

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its occurrence in contemporary culture is never innocent, no matter how much one may seek to disassociate it from the realm of commercial exploitation. The tendency of artists in recent times to retreat from a critical consideration of the annexation of glamour by economic interests is nowhere more evident than in the work of Takashi Murakami, which provides a marked contrast to Kawakubo’s interrogation of the aestheticization of commodities. Whereas Kawakubo has reacted against the glittering façade of consumer culture that emerged in Japan after the post-war years of austerity, as epitomized for instance in the dazzling display of neon signage in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Murakami embraces it. His artworks are inspired by the bright, seductive colours and seamless surfaces of advertising, featuring cute, anime- and manga-style imagery. By contrast with Kawakubo’s ‘rough-hewn’ style, he is known for his ‘superflat aesthetic’, which mimics the depthless façades of glamour in its utilization of flat planes of colour. Employing techniques reminiscent of advertising, Murakami has created his own trademark character known as ‘DOB’  –  a cartoon face with toothy grin. As a motif denoting his ‘signature’ style, this has been used to promote not simply his artworks but also a wide range of other products, including fashion items such as clothing, shoes and handbags. His easy assimilation into the world of fashion is indicated by his longstanding collaboration with Louis Vuitton. In 2002, at the invitation of designer Marc Jacobs, Murakami designed two monograms, which appeared on the fashion house’s handbags, using motifs derived from his artworks – one based on round, colourful flowers animated with smiling faces, the other featuring floating eye motifs taken from his anime characters. The friendly, anodyne images in bright, poppy colours present no challenge to the customer, serving simply to update the traditional Louis Vuitton monogram in a manner congruent with contemporary commodity aesthetics. Through this gesture, the distinction between the artist’s signature style and the advertising logo is collapsed. With Murakami, art has become fully absorbed into the realm of fashion, offering no critical resistance to it but becoming simply a promotional tool. As Grace McQuilten comments: Produced in the climate of postmodern cynicism, Murakami’s fantasy world is offered as consolation to the alienated subjects of late capital … This conflation of art and design is perfectly postmodern, celebrating the collapse of traditional binaries and the resulting homogenous consumer world. In this space, art is twisted into commerce, and commerce into art.24 The inclusion of a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique within the museums that staged retrospectives of Murakami’s work from 2007 to 2009 represents

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the culmination of this collapse of critical distance between the worlds of art and commerce. Kawakubo, by contrast, has not lost her critical perspective onto the fashion industry in spite of her integral involvement with it. While she recognizes the impossibility of locating herself outside of the commodity realm, as the artistic avant-garde of the first part of the twentieth century sought to do, neither does she simply capitulate to it. Rather, she maintains a relation of dialectical tension with the market within which she operates, exposing its machinations at the same time as she is embroiled in it. In doing so, she refuses the oppositional logic underlying the artistic avant-garde, which posited as the only alternatives either complete independence from or total complicity with the realm of bourgeois consumption. Thus, on the one hand, while her work has often been regarded as ‘art’ and has been assimilated into this realm through exhibitions in art museums and reviews in art journals, she continues to maintain that her enterprise is a business and that she is not an artist. As she said in a 2011 interview in the Wall Street Journal: ‘My work has never been as an artist. I have only continued all these years to try to “make a business with creation”.‘25 In this respect, her stance differs from that of the artistic avant-garde, which sought to disavow its commodity status. By the same token, however, this recognition of her inescapable involvement with the commodity nexus does not imply subservience to this market as has tended to occur with the artistic avant-garde when faced with the unpalatable truth of its entwinement with this realm. As she herself has commented: ‘If my ultimate goal was to achieve financial success, I would have done things differently, but I want to create something new. I want to suggest to people different aesthetics and values. I want to question their being.’26 Challenging the binary logic underlying the artistic avant-garde’s critique of commodification, she continually subjects the fashion industry’s guiding parameters to self-reflexive examination while at the same time continuing to operate within this realm. This relation of dialectical tension she maintains with the industry within which she operates is missed by those who assume financial success necessarily implies co-option by the market. No matter how much ‘anti-fashion’ is absorbed by the market it rails against, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds the commercial imperatives of the market, opening up spaces for reflection. A case in point is the controversy that was generated by Kawakubo’s Autumn/Winter menswear collection of 1995–6. The collection featured dressing gowns and striped pyjamas worn by emaciated-looking models with closely shaved heads, somewhat reminiscent of inmates in a concentration camp. At the time there was widespread condemnation of the collection on the grounds that it was a callous glamourization of suffering, particularly

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as it was launched on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. However, when viewed in the context of Kawakubo’s whole oeuvre, it is clear that, far from seeking to glamourize suffering, her purpose was to challenge the fashion industry’s cult of luxury and ostentation by representing the ‘repressed’, i.e. the dark underside of consumer capitalism  –  that which it would prefer to forget. The press’ condemnatory response to Kawakubo’s collection here fails to do justice to the multifaceted nature of her eschewal of glamour and luxury. As Joanne Finkelstein points out: ‘Given the skepticism provoked by interpretations of fashion and style, it is ironic that a desire to read the obvious should endure as if it were self-revealing – as has been the case with Rei Kawakubo’s striped pyjamas.’ She concludes that ‘to subject fashion to instances of chic outrage, then, as the mass media is wont to do, is to limit its scope and overlook much of its political and social significance’.27 To dismiss Kawakubo’s provocation simply as a publicity stunt, which exploits the suffering of others, misses then the dialectical nature of her engagement with the fashion industry. While she has been commercially successful, she has never resiled from an interrogation of its underlying premises. As such, her work has escaped the fate of the artistic avant-garde that, once having realized its incorporation in the market, tended to collapse into its opposite. Kawakubo’s position within the industry that she criticizes challenges the rhetoric of the total rejection of commodification and the utopian celebration of an altogether different future. It thus provides an alternative to the paralysis that is induced by the notion that the market invariably co-opts, represses and sterilizes. Rather than opposing consumerism from the outside, she interrogates its operations from the inside, thus refusing to give way to the cynical sway of contemporary consumer capitalism. As Dorinne Kondo puts it: The work of the Japanese avant-garde and the general arena of fashion provide a unique lens through which to view a central political/intellectual dilemma of our late twentieth century-worlds: the possibilities, not for pristine resistance or opposition, as though such a thing were possible, but for what Linda Hutcheon (1989) calls ‘complicitous critique’ within a discursive field defined by commodity capitalism and mass culture.28 Her work is more relevant than ever in an era that has seen an escalation in the celebration of conspicuous consumption. (See Figure 4.3.) This is epitomized by the transformation of fashion shows into totally immersive, quasi-theatrical extravaganzas that disarm the critical capacities of the viewer through the splendour of the spectacle. For instance, for his Spring/Summer 1998 Dior collection, John Galliano staged a spectacular show that invoked images of the Parisian department store of the nineteenth century as well

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FIGURE 4.3   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Jumper, bloomers, tights and shoes, MONSTER collection, Autumn/Winter 2014–15.

as the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition – the first French world fair to feature contemporary fashion in brightly lit display cases containing couturier-clad wax dummies. Taking his cue from these displays, Galliano presented his fashion designs in a series of classical rooms dressed with period furniture around which the models draped themselves like Hollywood starlets from the 1930s. In doing so, he recalled the earliest couture shows where the mannequins would parade decorously in the salon of the couture house that was styled to look like a private mansion rather than commercial premises. Galliano’s nostalgic designs conjured up an earlier period of idleness and luxury, in which women appeared both as desirable commodities as well as consumers.

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His fashions, along with those of other leading designers such as Christian Lacroix and Giorgio Armani, continued to be presented in opulent settings in the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine, where sumptuously clad models appeared in rooms of the Versailles Palace. This issue, which received widespread publicity through the film The September Issue, had as its main theme a celebration of glamour. Still more recently, in his last 2010 collection, Alexander McQueen recalled the splendour of the Baroque era in his sixteen outfits made of such materials as silk jacquard and satin and silk chiffon lavishly decorated with sumptuous gold embroideries, gold sequins, hand-painted gold feathers and jewellery reminiscent of the colours of stained glass. Kawakubo, by contrast, takes us behind the glittering façade, reminding us of the obverse side of capitalist consumerism. Her designs pose a challenge to the ‘society of the spectacle’, as do her fashion shows, which often take place in unsalubrious venues such as the Salvation Army’s Palais de la Femme in Paris – a centre that provides refuge to women in need. Unlike the models in recent fashion extravaganzas, the women in her fashion shows are not ciphers for consumer desire, but on the contrary subvert the viewer’s gaze. As described by Kondo, the models are generally ‘unsmiling, sullen, sober, sometimes defiant, and they seem oblivious, even hostile, to the onlooker’s gaze. The women wear little makeup, and their hair is arranged to appear messy, standing out from the head.’29 Furthermore, the outfits that they wear tend to conceal rather than reveal the body, being voluminous and baggy. In contrast with the tailored garments of Western haute couture, which are designed to accentuate the contours of the body, Kawakubo’s garments, which are drawn from the Japanese tradition of wrapping fabric around the body, allow for a much more fluid and organic relationship between the fabric and the body, in which the garment is constantly changing its form in response to the movements of its wearer. Instead of being constructed around an aesthetic of revelation and concealment, her clothes invoke a kinaesthetic sense of the body in motion, which takes them beyond the Western conception of fashion as a primarily visual art form. As Richard Martin puts it: With a layering, cloaking propensity offered as a fundamental alternative to tailored clothing comes as well a completely different body vis-à-vis clothing expression, subverting or at least posing an option for dress beyond the simple erotics and mechanics of an underlying and visible body.30 In her eschewal of the seductive allure of the glamorous, Kawakubo has inaugurated a trend towards a more self-critical approach to the process of commodification in the realm of fashion itself. Evidence of her influence can be seen for instance in the work of fashion designers such as Martin Margiela,

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Ann Demeulemeester and Hussein Chalayan, who all continue to interrogate the basic parameters of the industry. In a context where the cult of glamour and luxury has reached new heights, Kawakubo’s renunciation of ostentation serves as a salutary reminder that the embrace of glamour is never politically innocent. While artists have increasingly relinquished a critical perspective on the world of glamour in their reclamation of its sensual pleasures for themselves, Kawakubo continues the interrogation of this realm pioneered by the artistic avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, reminding us that behind the glossy surface there is a darker reality.

Notes 1 Leonard Koren, New Fashion Japan, Harper & Row, New York, 1984, pp. 20–1. 2 Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, Women and Fashion: A New Look, Quartet Books, London, 1989, pp. 160–61. 3 Bonnie English, ‘Fashion as Art: Postmodernist Japanese Fashion’, in Louise Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2005, p. 30; and Caroline Roux, ‘Tokyo’s Radical Rags’, Crafts 226, 2010, pp. 40–5. 4 Reka Buckley and Stephen Gundle, ‘Flash Trash: Gianni Versace and the Theory and Practice of Glamour’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 338. 5 Buckley and Gundle, ‘Flash Trash’, n. 4, p. 340. 6 Bonnie English, ‘Griffith University’s Tokyo Vogue – Japanese/Australian Fashion Exhibition’, in Bonnie English (ed.), Tokyo Vogue, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, 1999, pp. 7–16; and English, ‘Fashion as Art’, n. 3, pp. 29–30. 7 Harold Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, Costume: Journal of the Costume Society of America 11, 1985, p. 8. 8 Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, Imperfect Publishing, Point Reyes, CA, 2008, pp. 54, 59. 9 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2003, p. 114. 10 Alison Gill has a useful discussion of the notion of deconstruction in fashion in ‘Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-Assembled Clothes’, Fashion Theory 2(1), 1998, pp. 25–50. 11 On all this, see Deyan Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, Rizzoli, New York, 1990. 12 Remy Saisselin, Bricabracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, pp. 33–44.

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13 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, Berg, Oxford, 2011, p. 86. 14 Suzy Menkes, ‘Kawakubo’s Commune: A Retail Rebellion’, International Herald Tribune, 7 September 2004, p. 10; and Jon Caramanica, ‘Inside with the Outsiders’, New York Times, 9 January 2014, E1. 15 Sylvia Lavin, ‘Pas Comme des Architectes: On Becoming Rei Kawakubo’, in ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2008, p. 47. 16 Arthur Danto has a useful discussion of the anti-aestheticism of the artistic avant-garde in the first part of the twentieth century in ‘Beauty for Ashes’, in Neal Benezra (ed.), Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1999, pp. 183–97. 17 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 316. 18 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Sage, London, 1993, p. 90. Julian Stallabrass expands further on this process and its impact on the artworld in ‘Shop until you Stop’, in Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (eds), Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Hatje Cantz, Frankfurt, 2002, pp. 222–30. 19 Warhol cited in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-tight: The Velvet Underground Story, Omnibus Press, London, 2002, p. 66. 20 Chris Townsend, Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 20. 21 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime’, in Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Allworth Press, New York, 1999, p. 43. 22 Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime’, n. 21, p. 48. 23 Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘Beauty and the Contemporrary Sublime’, n. 21, p. 80. 24 Grace McQuilten, Art in Consumer Culture, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, p. 9. 25 Rei Kawakubo, ‘Interview’, Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2011, p. 2 (http:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903918104576500263503794504) accessed 12 October 2021. 26 Frankel cited in Claire Wilcox, ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons Label’, p. 2 (http://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-clothing-industry/fashiondesigners/rei-kawakubos-comme-des-garcons-label) accessed 24 September 2021. 27 Joanne Finkelstein, ‘Chic Outrage and Body Politics’, in Kathy Davis (ed.), Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, Sage, London, 1997, pp. 163, 164. 28 Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre, Sage, London, 1997, p. 105. 29 Kondo, About Face, n. 28, p. 128. 30 Richard Martin, ‘Our Kimono Mind: Reflections on “Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950”’, Journal of Design History 8(3), 1995, p. 215.

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5 Rei Kawakubo and the luxury of freedom Ory Bartal

R

ei Kawakubo made her debut in the Western fashion world in its capital Paris in 1981, with an avant-garde fashion show that featured clothes characterized by subversive aesthetics. The garments were mistakenly perceived by fashion journalists, who at the time were accustomed to glamorous models and luxurious fabrics, as a ‘poor look’, and a witty sharppenned fashion columnist wrote: ‘Les Japonais jouent “Les Misérables”.’1 In retrospect, it turned out to be a very accurate observation: just like the musical Les Misérables, whose production costs millions of dollars, featured the world’s most renowned actors and played in the most prestigious theatre centres around the world, Rei Kawakubo also displays her clothes with their destroyed look at the world’s prestigious fashion centres, their prices are among the highest in the world and her fashion label, characterized by clothes with loose stitches, is supported by a well-structured business model and brand. Today, Comme des Garçons is a financial empire that employs some 600 people and has a turnover of 280 million dollars (in 2017). The company, which has an eminent position in one of the leading commercial industries, manufactures diverse fashion lines (Comme des Garçons Noir, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Comme des Garçons Tricot, Play Comme des Garçons, etc.) and employs an army of independent designers such as Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara, Fumito Ganryu and Kei Ninomiya. It has a global distribution of shops and collaborates with global fashion companies such as Levi’s, Speedo, Nike, H&M and Louis Vuitton. In an interview with the New York Times, Kawakubo once commented: ‘It is true that I “design” the company, not just the clothes.’2 Following this

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statement, I wish to demonstrate, in this chapter, how Comme des Garçons’ avant-garde nature is manifested not only in the clothes, but mostly in Kawakubo’s ability to translate subversive aesthetics into a luxurious sign value within the capitalist system. In order to explain the conflicted position of the company as anti-fashion within the global fashion industry and as an avant-garde company that sells luxury goods, I will go back to the years of its inception and the social–historical climate in Japan at the time. Kawakubo opened her brand just one year after the violent social uprisings of 1968, and against the background of counterculture forces and anti-art and anti-design movements. At the same time, it was also an era of high-speed affluence, known as the Japanese economic miracle, which gave rise to the development of late consumer culture values and to new world-leading companies (such as the Sony Corporation and Honda Motors) that produced well-designed innovative products.3 I would like to argue that in Comme des Garçons Kawakubo integrated the two contradictory forces of the era – the subversive and the capitalist – to create a new avant-garde brand that operates in keeping with, and in defiance of, the rules of the visual world and marketing world while merging the two.

Comme des Garçons and the 1968 movement Since the 1950s, subversive art collectives (such as gutai and jiken kobo of the 1950s and noe-dada [Neo-Dadaism Organizers], Hi Red Centre and mono-ha of the 1960s and early 1970s) struck out against modern and traditional art forms, paving the way for the rise of a new avant-garde that radically altered the course of Japanese art.4 They protested against established art institutions, conventional standards of beauty and the corporate mentality, employing unconventional materials and styles that challenged the rigid hierarchy of Japanese pre-modern/modern art and market forces. These movements rose on the background of the social revolution that culminated in the violent 1968 student riots, which spread from campuses to nationwide social protests, in which thousands of demonstrators brought Japan to the verge of a civil revolution. These protests, led by the New Left movements, called for complete emancipation from all restrictive ideologies and organizations and opposed all forms of rational debate and hierarchical institutions. They advocated the cultivation of a sense of personal authenticity and independence.5 At the time, provocative outdoor performances of these anti-art collectives had rendered Tokyo, according to Doryun Chong, a multilayered matrix of avant-garde production and energy.6 Many of the street performances and guerrilla actions of the new avant-garde art emphasized the body as a primary

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artistic tool, like the radical street performances of zero jigen (Zero Dimension), an artist collective that performed ‘rituals’ (gishiki) comprised of outstandingly unsocial behaviours (such as rolling naked inside a shrine and wearing gas masks on the street), in a way that undermined the regulated codes of propriety and shocked unwitting witnesses in public spaces.7 Interestingly, many of the women artists who were active in these avant-garde movements chose to address the issue of body politics through the medium of clothes.8 Atsuko Tanaka, for example, held her ‘Electric Dress’ performance in 1957, in which she wore a dress composed entirely of light bulbs of all shapes, sizes and colours, and a plethora of connected electrical cords.9 Another example is Yoko Ono’s (who was a member of Fluxus) famous performance Cut Piece (Sōgetsu Centre, 1964). During this performance, Ono knelt on stage wearing a black dress and invited the audience to cut her clothes, remaining completely still as they approached her, one by one shredding her dress to pieces. Via the medium of the ‘little black dress’, Ono raised the thorny issue of the reciprocality between the aggressor and the victim. These experimental performances generated a radical shift in the relationship between art and society by cancelling the distance between artist and viewer, breaking the boundaries between high art and public space and between body and art and bringing to the fore the issue of body politics.10 The subversive visual expression of these performances constituted a dramatic departure from what was considered art, with their use of simple, ‘poor’ materials and emphasis on concepts rather than craftsmanship. This new attitude towards the body and public space was manifested in other contemporaneous creative fields such as architecture, photography, theatre, dance and design.11 The style of the new subversive design scene is best exemplified in the works of Tadanori Yokoo and Kōga Hirano, who conveyed the turbulent spirit of the times by stepping out against the modernist visual expression and the International Style of the 1950s.12 Women were also very active in the avant-garde design scene, the most famous of whom was art director and graphic designer Eiko Ishioka, who worked in the advertising arena and in the 1970s created a revolutionary advertising campaign that spoke out against the social conventions of the time by assimilating feminist messages in advertisements for the trendy Parco department store.13 This kind of critical design was not exclusive to Japan, and emerged in different locations around the world in the same period. The emergence of rock ’n’ roll music scenes in California and Britain, for instance, engendered a subversive graphic design practice that provided the bands with posters and album covers to go hand-in-hand with their rebellious music.14 In Italy, the anti-art movement Arte Povera inspired anti-design that focused on the destruction of the object and the creation of new objects that contradicted user expectations regarding their function.15 Radical Italian designers posed

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questions about the relation between design and society and the status of the designer as a social agent and not just a provider of a service. Blurring the boundaries between art and design, these designers sought to abolish any gender or socio-economic elements within design, and referred to their works as anti-class, anti-consumer, anti-marketing and thus also anti-design.16 Like other subversive visual expressions of the time, Kawakubo’s clothes were characterized by their defiance of the modernist design codes. Her designs challenged modern fashion’s ‘imaginary body’, a body type defined as the timeless shape that excludes any other bodily silhouette – distorted, short, misshapen, weary or disproportional – from the world of fashion. The fashion world’s approach at the time viewed these as bodies whose faults should be fixed, blurred or covered by clothing.17 Using the platform of clothes, Kawakubo raised the issue of body politics and fought against this concept, wishing to present the entire spectrum of the human body, which for the most part does not match the canon of proportions dictated by fashion designers. In the vein of other radical art and design of the time, she set out to undermine rigid social values and cultural codes (in this instance, those of the fashion world) and to re-examine the status and meaning of design in society as an agent dealing with the concepts of social class by deconstructing modern ways of thinking and the institutional structures that upheld them. However, from the very beginning, Kawakubo’s path was different from that of Tadanori Yokoo’s psychedelic style or Shiro Kuramata’s postmodernism, since she never acquired any formal design or fashion training. Kawakubo studied philosophy and literature in Keio University, at a time when humanities scholarship was heavily influenced by deconstructive theory; and so her skills, according to Patricia Mears, are not in her hands, but rather in her ability to engage in a theoretical discourse.18 And so, in contrast with other designers in the anti-design scene who broke down conventions with material, colour or shape, Kawakubo began to design (and claims to still follow this strategy to this day) through words. In an interview with the New York Times Kawakubo described this stage in her process: I start every collection with one word. 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.19 This description clearly presents the intellectual foundation of Comme des Garçons, rooted in critical deconstructivist practice, which engages in the questioning of the text’s fixed meaning.20 The deconstruction of the text,

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performed through the rejection of its initial meaning and the presentation of its inherent difference, illuminates the imperfection and incoherence of the rational tradition. This theory had a huge impact on the visual world, as demonstrated by the anti-art and anti-design movements, and, as Mears rightly observed, this was the driving force behind Kawakubo’s work. When deconstruction as a visual strategy entered the fashion world, it used clothes as a form of visual protest against the dominance of modernist fashion that produced finely finished patterns to fit and define the human body. Deconstructed fashion offered silhouettes that concealed the body rather than show it and presented seemingly undone, unravelled or tattered clothes. The pieces looked like a juxtaposition of asymmetrical, mismatched parts, joined into what could almost be considered wearable sculptures, paying more attention to the space that surrounded the body rather than accentuating, flattering or enhancing the body of the wearer. These were radically incongruous with Parisian high fashion, which prided itself on impeccable draping designed with the ideal body in mind. While deconstructive fashion could also be found in Britain at the time, Kawakubo formalized and appropriated it in full, leaving no modernist fashion dictate unchallenged, prompting a French fashion journal to dub her ‘Le Destroy’. Indeed, her clothes presented a poor look, based on devastation and degradation that were the main characteristics of conceptual and subversive aesthetics in Japanese anti-art, architecture, photography and dance of the period. Of course, as with other anti-art and design movements, the innovative aesthetics of the garments and their patterns were also social and ideological acts, which presented protest through visual means rooted in the deconstructivist theoretical infrastructure.21 (See Figure 5.1.) Over the years, the conceptual aesthetics of Kawakubo changed in accordance with different deconstructive practices that extended from the foundations of the deconstructivist position. These practices were directed against centralist and oppressive discourses, aiming to break down common outlooks and distinctions, like the distinction between feminine and masculine or between centre and margin.22 One of the outcomes of these deconstructive practices was the uncovering of the ‘other’ on several levels – the other body, the other gender, the other culture or the foreign elements within us. This subject recurs in Kawakubo’s work through the media of clothing and fashion photography. One notable example is the Spring/Summer 1997 collection entitled Body Meets Dress  –  Dress Meets Body. The collection, comprised of clothes that used padding to disproportionally exaggerate the volume of the necks, upper backs, hips and rear ends, challenged the fashion world’s exclusion mechanisms aimed at the distorted, different and ‘other’ body.23 This practice can be seen also in later collections such as MONSTER (Autumn/ Winter 2014–15) and The Future of the Silhouette (Autumn/Winter 2017–18).24 (See Plates 4 and 5 in colour insert.) This avant-garde aesthetic also challenges the distinction made between Japanese and Western styles, specifically the

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FIGURE 5.1   Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017. Orientalist perception of her clothes by some Western critics as rooted in Japanese traditions (influenced by wabi-sabi aesthetics and adopting the volumes of the kimono) and Japanese and Western critics who perceive them as belonging simply to the Western deconstructive fashion genre.25 Therefore, the collections blur also the perception of Japan as a cultural ‘other’, in a manner typical of postcolonialist theories. (See Figure 5.2.) A comment on the notion of the ‘other’ is also expressed in the name of the company, Comme des Garçons (‘like boys’), and those given to its products, such as the unisex perfume ‘G I R L’. These names not only insinuate Kawakubo’s perception of gender equality and cancellation of the binary separation between men and women, but also strive to alter the basic concept that fashion creates power relations in which the woman dresses for the male gaze and tries to seduce him with a sexy appearance. These concepts, elaborated from body politics to identity politics discourse, were presented in the 2006–7 Autumn/Winter collection entitled Persona. In this collection Kawakubo addressed the notion of ‘performativity’ taken from Judith Butler’s gender theories that discuss the socially constructed aspect of gender, which obscures the inner contradiction and instability of any single person’s gender act.26 The Persona collection showcased the different ways  we present

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FIGURE 5.2   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. The Future of the Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017. ourselves to the world by fusing tailored menswear with more feminine elements such as corsets and floral dress fabrics. By combining the feminine with the masculine, the collection challenged binary gendered categories and the distinction between sex and gender, while presenting a more atypical image of the social.27 Through subversive cuts, Kawakubo presented the selfaware freak as a strategy for an act of mending and engendering a new social and political tolerance. (See Plate 6 in colour insert.) These are just a couple of examples of Kawakubo’s ideological standpoint and its development. However, the story of the company’s formation does not stop there, and the question is how did she manage to translate this subversive ideology into commercial success?

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Comme des Garçons and the ideology of consumption Like any other fashion brand, Comme des Garçons simultaneously embraces and operates along two distinct marketing routes: the first deals with aesthetics and the other deals with the commercial or economic aspect. The interaction between these two forces guides and affects the final product. Thus in order to fully understand the brand’s roots we should go back to examine the economic climate of the 1960s in which Kawakubo established her company, since it facilitated her work, which may have been inconceivable within a different economic setting. The 1960s were shaped not only by political riots and a subversive art and design scene, but also by another socio-economic force: a new form of capitalism. The 1960s ushered in the consumer revolution that was led by Prime Minister Ikeda, who decided, as a reaction to the sociopolitical protests at the beginning of the decade, to direct the attention of the people to the economy in declaring his ‘Income Doubling Plan’.28 As part of the new Keynesian economics that Ikeda introduced to Japan, his administration lowered interest rates and taxes to private players such as Sony Corporation and Honda Motor Company, which produced innovative and well-designed products for the emerging consumer culture. This new policy drove Japan to the position of a world economic power, second only to the United States.29 The new industrial players paved the way to an era of high-speed affluence, and by the end of the decade the period was known as the ‘economic miracle’. Japan became a major exporter of steel, ships, oil tankers, cars and household appliances. The government expanded its investments in infrastructure development, and for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and 1970 World Expo highways were widened, new roads and high-speed railways were constructed, while subways, airports and port facilities were built one after the other. The economic prosperity led to a boost in Japanese businesses – many of which became world-leading companies. During those years, a new capitalist ideology by the name of ‘late consumer culture’ developed in Japan, reaching its peak during the 1980s, when Japan, the industrial powerhouse, became a financial superpower. With the rise of popular cultural institutes in the 1970s and 1980s, consumers devoted themselves to the pleasures of consumption.30 During those years Japanese companies started building their corporate identity and the boundaries between the product and its branding blurred.31 The use of brands and consumer goods in the formulation of a lifestyle that emphasized individualism and social prestige had made consumption not only legitimate but also an important social activity. Jean Baudrillard argued already in 1972 that ‘an accurate theory of objects will not be established on a theory of

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needs and their satisfaction, but upon a theory of social prestations and signification’.32 In order to explain the new consumer culture and the blurring between economics and culture, Baudrillard deconstructed traditional economic perceptions and introduced the concept of ‘sign value’. He claimed that: ‘An object is not an object of consumption unless it is released from its psychic determinations as symbol; from its functional determinations as instrument; from its commercial determinations as product; and is thus liberated as a sign to be recaptured by the formal logic of fashion, i.e., by the logic of differentiation.’ For him, the acquisition of a product from a wide pool of alternatives boils down to the selection of a sign with a certain style that creates differentiation and forges connectivity from one group to other groups. This can be restated by saying that, whenever consumers purchase products, the actual ‘product’ that is being purchased is identity. John Clammer, who researched Japanese consumer culture, has similarly argued: ‘Shopping is not merely the acquisition of things. It is the buying of identity.’33 This new social behaviour that blurred boundaries between economics and society was reflected predominantly in the new approach to fashion that had become a new religion in Japan during the bubble period.34 In the urban structure of Tokyo, where homes, furniture and cars were not usually visible and did not function as codes of identity, fashion and brand names became the most relied upon signifier for consumers to build their social and personal identity. Many fashion companies positioned their products as powerful, sexy and luxurious, targeting the consumer as an individual who, as Tadanori Yokoo argued, sought to express his or her personality and attain social status in a crowded homogeneous society, and at a time of an erosion of traditional markers of social distinction, by using fashion brands and labels.35 Comme des Garçons, which was established in 1969, becomes from its very beginning a meeting point of the many forces that shaped the era: the social revolution, the avant-garde aesthetics of the anti-art and antidesign movements, and the rise of deconstructive theories, as well as the economic miracle and the new values of the late consumer market. Nurturing a company at a time of great polarity between two main forces – capitalism and counterculture  –  probably enabled Kawakubo to understand not only the potential and efficacy of the progressive radical body politics and avantgarde aesthetics that flourished at the time, but also their seductive power in fashion. In an interview Kawakubo explained: I’ve always said I am not an artist. For me, fashion design is a business. It’s just one of the ways of doing business … but I also stem perhaps from wanting people to be free and independent … It’s a convenient and simple way of giving that independence because everybody has to wear clothes … For me fashion design is just an expression of what I feel about life. But it is also commercial.36

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The dual skills presented in her words should remind us that beyond philosophy studies (1962–4) Kawakubo also arrived at fashion through training at the advertising department of Asahi Kasei Textile company (1964–7), which undoubtedly instilled in her the importance of advertising and branding to a fashion company. Theoretical philosophical perceptions on the one hand, and mechanisms of advertising in the capitalist system on the other (two subjects that usually are not a part of fashion design students’ curriculum), allowed her to look at the social struggle through an economic prism and examine how it is possible to continue this struggle via the wardrobe of urban affluent men and women. Therefore we might say that, unlike designers and artists who created a new visual expression in the wake of deconstructivist theory, Kawakubo took this theory one step further when she skillfully melded an avant-garde aesthetic, deconstructive discourse and socially subversive struggle into a sign value in the capitalist system. This can be seen in one of her most avantgarde collections Not Making Clothing (Spring/Summer 2014), which creates a subversive sign within a commercial collection.37 (See Plate 7 in colour insert.) In his discussion of cultural criticism in the twenty-first century in a reality entrenched in the logic of late capitalism, Slavoj Žižek mentions companies that paradoxically brand themselves through the ecological protest that originally targeted the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. He terms this new phase of commodification ‘cultural capitalism’, which, he says, has internalized the legacy of 1968 and the criticism of alienated consumerism.38 Comme des Garçons is an interesting case study for this cultural capitalism, as it translated social campaigns into sign value by using the possibilities provided by late consumer culture, in which each style can become a ‘product’ in the supermarket of ideas, attitudes and references of late capitalism. The translation of subversive visual language into a brand sign value was performed by applying a subversive visual strategy to commercial products such as company advertising and shop interiors, as well as entitling dresses, creating confrontational runway shows, and legendary stores, such as the first shop that did not have mirrors, since Kawakubo wanted women to buy clothes because of how they felt rather than the way they looked. Beyond the creation of commercial products based on an avant-garde aesthetic, the company also shaped an avant-garde consumption experience, like opening guerrilla stores at venues that were not fashion centres, such as Reykjavik, Warsaw or Beirut.39 All these actions add up to marketing strategies, public relation campaigns and a narrative that can be consumed via fashion magazines that mediate the language of fashion for consumers and turn products into stylebearing signs. As part of these sign-building activities, a major emphasis was given to the company’s graphic design, advertisements and printed publications. As an example of the way Comme des Garçons was framed by an avant-garde visual content, I would like to present the graphic work that art director Tsuguya

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Inoue designed for the company during the 1990s. One poster created an enigmatic visual expression by presenting fragments shooting up in the air without portraying any articles of clothing. The photo in the poster is taken from an explosion that takes place in the last minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, which told the story of the counterculture movement that was active in the United States at the time. Another enigmatic image is used in the poster and invitation for the 1998 Spring/Summer fashion show. This invitation featured a photograph by the Swiss artist Roman Singer known for his action sculptures, performed through explosions, collisions or accidents. (See Figure 5.3.)

FIGURE 5.3   Tsuguya Inoue. Invitation for Comme des Garçons, Spring/Summer 1998, 1997.

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FIGURE 5.4   Tsuguya Inoue. Calendar ’90–’99 for Comme des Garçons, 1990. The image on the invitation depicted a sculpture made of water erupting from a pair of boots, creating an ephemeral formless body. This sculpture of an amorphous body that is not masculine or feminine, made of a material that is not used for sculpting, challenged the world of material and body perception alike. Another graphic product designed by Inoue was a calendar that displayed nine years simultaneously, from 1990 to 1999. (See Figure 5.4.) The calendar is composed of two separate posters, each measuring oneand-a-half metres by one metre. One featured a repeated pattern of a whale fin, and the other poster featured a grid of 3,285 numbers to represent every day of the years between 1990 and 1999. The image of the whale’s tail, the animal whose body is furthest from the fashion world, presents the ‘other’ body found in Kawakubo’s work. At the same time, the image of the tail also showcases the different and unique characteristics of each whale, since the tail’s pattern is what distinguishes each whale in the school. As such, the poster stressed the differences between animals of the same species, revealed in unusual places. This calendar undermines the perception of time as well as body perception, two critical issues in the fashion world. These are just a few of many similar examples. The printed materials used in the label’s advertising campaigns and catalogues do not present glamorous models or a narrative with which the consumer can identify. Moreover, they often do not make any direct reference to clothes or fashion, offering in their place an image that conveys the spirit of the collection. By not depicting

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clothes or other saleable products, these posters challenged the expectation of what fashion photography and advertising should be. Therefore I would like to suggest that not only does Comme des Garçons offer radical aesthetics, it also offers a radical ideology of consumption. This consumerism is inextricably entwined with protest against a consumer culture that sanctifies the beautiful, luxurious and the brand system. Thus it offers a consumption ideology that we could call ‘subversive consumerism’. However, in order to promote this radical consumerist practice in the global fashion industry, Kawakubo had to take this aesthetic away from its natural place in the margins, and displace it to the centre of the fashion world. This process started as early as 1981, when she presented her avantgarde fashion line in Paris in the same context as conventional fashion luxury products, bestowing her subversive aesthetics with the same esteem as haute couture fashion designs. Kawakubo also positioned her designs as luxurious by adopting a strategy of blurring the line between design and art. Already in the 1980s, her design products were exhibited in museums: one of her earliest exhibitions was a show of the company’s fashion photography (entitled Mode et photo by the photographer Peter Lindbergh) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. The show featured the famous photograph of her 1982 ‘Lace Sweater’, which shaped the company’s deconstructivist image more than any actual sales of the garment.40 In 1988–91 Kawakubo issued a print magazine titled Six (created by art director Tsuguya Inoue and the editor Atsuko Kozasu) that supplemented the Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter collections with conceptual artworks by artists and designers who were not directly involved with the fashion industry. This was an entirely new way to communicate the brand’s direction in a way that no other fashion company had done before.41 This blurring of lines was extended to fashion photography in 1994–5, when Kawakubo provided Cindy Sherman with clothing to be photographed in any manner Sherman wished. (See Figure 5.5; also see Plate 2 in colour insert.) The collaboration produced images that were a far cry from conventional fashion photography, in which the clothes took a backseat to the grotesque characters and deformed mannequins shaped by Sherman. The photographs were used as advertisements sent in a direct-mail campaign for the Comme des Garçons Autumn/Winter 1994–5 collection, and were also displayed at the company’s Soho boutique as artworks that were later printed in limited edition. The collections themselves were given titles, such as Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body, which inspired a dance performance choreographed by Merce Cunningham. The collection also gained a graphic dimension through a series of posters designed by Ionue, one of which compared the face of a lobster with a mannequin that had been deliberately deformed (by adding pillows to the body) to allow the design of the pattern for the garment.

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FIGURE 5.5   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Top and skirt, Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection, Spring/Summer 1997.

The advertisement surprisingly portrayed the design process rather than the final product through the notion of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, shrouded with ambivalence as to who is the beauty and who is the beast. This advertisement was featured in the book Visionaire No. 20, which was printed in a limited edition of 2,800 individually signed copies and sold as a work of art. The book featured different fashion photography, under a headline that asked ‘What do you make of this?’ This type of graphic work demonstrates the importance that Kawakubo ascribed to advertising and fashion photography. Great importance was also attributed to the way the clothes were sold, blurring the lines between art and economy in the positioning of stores like the Trading Museum, which is a museum–retail hybrid store in Tokyo, or the Seoul concept store that includes

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a gallery. In addition, Kawakubo created one-off pieces that incorporated hand craft in mass production, creating a new type of mass-imperfection. All of these innovative design practices and marketing strategies create an aura of eccentricity and exclusivity for the brand, positioning its products as unique and luxurious goods.42 However, it is important to note that while luxury is central to the branding of Comme des Garçons, it is disguised by being presented in the form of its denial. As is her practice: while she positioned the company’s sign as luxurious, Kawakubo adopted a strategy of deconstructing the very meaning of ‘luxury’ in the fashion industry. By repositioning avant-garde aesthetics at fashion centres, Kawakubo represented the clothes in terms that linked them to a repudiation of the excessive luxury associated with mainstream fashion labels. It offered a new luxury sign that was not defined by wealth manifested as exclusive or high-quality materials or glamorous models, but by means of freedom. This was the spirit of freedom that was born in the 1960s and translated in late consumer ideology to the acquisition of a sign that represents critical thinking, reminding consumers that the language of the fashion world not only does not provide authentic identity or happiness, but for the most part produces an oppressive discourse through clothes and advertisements that present an unrealistic perception of the human body and a false identity. In other words, wearing something that is beyond the quotidian signifies the idea that the highest luxury one can obtain is the freedom to be oneself. Such clothes are of course perceived as luxurious by the devotees of the avantgarde, especially in the art/architecture/design milieu, who are familiar with deconstructivist codes and aesthetics and appreciate the brand’s eccentricity and exclusivity. And so, although intellectually imbued garments informed by a complex theory, with the practice and aesthetics of deconstruction presented as an aesthetic act, the garments could also be understood as an example of the symbolic inversion of value called ‘ostentatious poverty’, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term.43 Ostentatious poverty shifts the field of action and importance from radical aesthetics to an amalgam of economics and social issues.44 The sign enables a symbolic subversion of the bourgeois order, namely, a consumption of identity that provides intellectuals with a sign that allows them to engage with fashion in a thoughtful manner that does not suggest that they are simply following fashion trends and marketing ploys like a fashion victim. I would like to conclude with an example of a design performance that presents the different layers of the brand and how it simultaneously operates in keeping with, and in defiance of, the rules of the world of aesthetics and economy, while merging the two. In 1994 Kawakubo launched her company’s perfume in urinary catheter plastic bags that made the yellow perfume liquid look like urine. Those were placed in the window display of the flagship store in

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Aoyama as well as around the pool of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The performance, which raises the concept of the abject, represents another visual and theoretical development in Kawakubo’s work. The abject is a psychoanalytical term that indicates, according to Julia Kristeva, a mental state of chaos of the subject during the symbiotic stage with the mother; a state during which there is a terrifying presence of ‘the other’. In our adult life, this mental state is presented through the untouchable, degrading, dirty elements in human experience; elements that are foreign to us and at the same time most intimate to us, like blood, menstruation, faeces and urine. The abject, which was excluded by any fashion discourse, had entered the world of art already with the emergence of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century (Dada and Surrealism), but was manifested in its full force in the 1960s and 1970s, in the neo-Dadaist Fluxus or Punk scene countercultures that engaged with body art, from the ranks of which came Kawakubo.45 The geological foundations of the abject discourse can also be found in pop art, which introduced the ready-made to artistic representation, incorporating everyday, commercial and ‘other’ objects into the art world. Andy Warhol addressed the notion of abjection in his homage to Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism with a series of works entitled Oxidation Paintings (1977–8), in which he urinated on oxidizing copper plates. Kawakubo corresponds with this art and further develops the aesthetic sensibility it adopts when she presents seductive luxury goods – perfume – as urine. The blurring between perfume and urine echoes the same mental state in which the sublime and the abject switch roles, as Kristeva describes it. The installation also undermines the conventional meaning of perfume in the fashion world as sexually seductive and alluring, since in it Kawakubo reminds us that smell has the ability to conjure up repressed thoughts and memories, thus linking perfume with a new function that corresponds with Kristeva’s psychoanalytical discussion. The installation is groundbreaking in the visual world and marketing world alike, as it performs a displacement and locates the avant-garde expression not in a gallery, where one might expect to find a fringe avant-garde installation, but at a luxury centre of the world, which doubles as a commercial site – The Ritz, Paris. And so, in a clever shift, the artistic installation becomes a story that will be told in fashion magazines, blogs and fashion websites, and will help build the sign value of the company. This performance presents the blurring of boundaries between culture and economy through the blurring between design products and art, while presenting the theoretical concept (abject) as a sign value and shifting the display venue of the avant-garde. Thus, Kawakubo translates a critical statement into a sign of luxury in the fashion world while at the same time anchoring the product in the commercial economic world. In other words, the installation presents a work that undermines the values of the fashion world, within the frameworks that the fashion world rules allow.

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The complex work of Kawakubo, who designs clothes alongside interior design, graphic work and branding, while using the capitalist space as a platform for presenting radical opinions and aesthetics, should be understood at the intersection of several discourses. On the one hand, the development of a visual avant-garde expression that offers a new bodily perception and politics of identity that smash hierarchies and categories and break down values involved in bodily perception, femininity and masculinity, consumption and identity, which had been cultivated by the fashion industry over decades. At the same time it is an invitation for a radical consumerism that opposes the production of identity through luxury products, as is customary in late consumerist culture. Her design invites the consumer to be critical of the society and capitalist ideology that envelops us, while it challenges both modernism through innovative patterns and late consumer culture through offering a new consumerist ideology.

Notes 1 The journalist might have been referring to ‘misérables’ in the simple meaning, but was most probably referring to the musical. See Patricia Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Japan Fashion Now,Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000, p. 158. 2 Suzy Menkes, ‘Positive Energy: Comme at 40’, New York Times, 8 June 2009. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/fashion/09iht-fcomme.html) accessed 2 February 2022. 3 Winston Davis, Japanese Religion and Society: Paradigm of Structure and Change, University of New York Press, New York, 1992, p. 94. 4 In 1954, the gutai movement launched as the first post-war avant-garde art movement. It created experimental art installations and performance art that combined movement and sound. This was followed by the neo-Dada antiart movement in 1959, which created conceptual art and pop art. Mono-ha was formed in 1968, emphasizing the materialism of the work and planting the seeds for contemporary art in Japan. See Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, pp. 258–59. 5 The riots in Japan erupted in 1960 in protest against the Japanese government’s intention to extend a bilateral security agreement with the United States. What started as a protest against Japan’s subordination to the United States soon shifted to target the actions of the Japanese government, such as its involvement in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, which was perceived as a reversion to Japan’s role as the victimizer of Asian nations. The protest had been dominated by established parties and unions such as the anti-Vietnam War League (beheiren) and the student umbrella organizations (zengakuren and zenkyōtō). See Claudia Derichs, ‘Japan: 1968 – History of

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REI KAWAKUBO a Decade’, in Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke (eds), 1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 2009, pp. 89–91. See also Davis, Japanese Religion and Society, n. 3, p. 94.

6 The post-war avant-garde movements created guerrilla performance events in the public sphere such as the neo-Dada group’s exhibitions in the 1960s, which were accompanied by shocking performances and guerrilla actions on the streets and incorporated destructive actions and ephemeral junk art. A notable performance held by Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jirō Takamatsu entitled Yamanote Jiken (Yamanote Incident) took place in a Tokyo train station. See Doryun Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde’, in Doryun Chong (ed.), Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, pp. 27–58. 7 Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970’, n. 6, p. 68. 8 Japanese avant-garde movements were relatively more accessible and open to women, who had only been admitted to Japanese art academies and exhibitions since the 1950s. See Midori Yoshimoto, ‘Women Artists in the Japanese Avant-Garde: Celebrating a Multiplicity’, Woman’s Art Journal 27(1), Spring/Summer 2006, p. 28. However, in most cases, even in the art collectives women did not receive equal treatment, as in the case of Sayako Kishimoto (1939–88). See Yoshimoto, ‘Women Artists’, pp. 28–9. 9 Namiko Kunimoto, ‘Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress and the Circuits of Subjectivity’, The Art Bulletin, XCV(3), September 2013, pp. 465–83. 10 Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970’, n. 6, p. 64. 11 New subversive movements developed during these years in Japan. For example, the avant-garde architecture movement Metabolism; the photography of Daido Moriyama, who presented the dark side of urban spaces; avant-garde theatres such as angura, Red Tent Theater and tenjosaiki Theatre; and butoh dancing. See Mark Holborn, Beyond Japan: A Photo Theatre, Jonathan Cape, London, 1991, pp. 50–84. 12 Tadanori Yokoo and Kōga Hirano, who created posters that served the music scene and avant-garde Japanese theatre, blurred the boundaries between low and high, art and design, with an inimitable style that mixed images from very different worlds, in psychedelic colours and busy, collagist compositions. See David Goodman, Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, pp. 1–13. 13 For more about Ishioka’s Parco campaign, see Ory Bartal, Post-Modern Advertising in Japan, Dartmouth College Press, New England, 2015, pp. 1–5. 14 A group called the ‘Big Five’ of psychedelia (Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse and Richard Griffin) designed posters for the music scene in California. See Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design – A New History, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp. 338–39. 15 Radical design was also developed in Italy by groups like Studio de Pas, D’urbino, Lomazzi, as well as by individual designers like Gaetano Pesce and Ettore Sottsass. See David Raizman, History of Modern Design, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2003, pp. 345–46. 16 Italian radical design might have had an influence on Kawakubo. For example, the Sacco ‘Beanbag’ chair – designed in 1969 by the Italian studio

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Gatti, Paolini and Teodoro – was a legless chair that looked like a punching bag, giving no indication regarding the proper place and direction for sitting. This chair, a symbol of anti-design, had an unusual volume compared with a modernist chair and was not ergonomically built with reference to the human body, looking more like a sculptural element. These characteristics, as well as its black colour, remind us more than a little of elements in Kawakubo’s clothes. Regarding the black colour in Rei Kawakubo’s work, see Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 1, p. 171. 17 Yael Taragan, ‘Altering the “Basics”: Basic Patterns and Basic Assumptions in Fashion’, Protocols: History and Theory, online magazine of the Department of History and Theory, Bezalel, No. 16 – Modes of Creation: Jewelry and Fashion, April 2010 (https://journal.bezalel.ac.il/en/protocol/article/3122) accessed 2 February 2022. 18 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 1, p. 162. 19 Menkes, ‘Positive Energy’, n. 2. 20 In his essay ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in which he explains how the term ‘deconstruction’ should be translated, Jacques Derrida claims that this position is not a method or a strict doctrine. He maintains that there are different words to describe it, such as différance, supplement and displacement, which are terms that create a definition but that elude fixed naming. 21 Roland Barthes claimed that fashion products are not merely functional, but are rather a semiotic element that signifies and points to other signifiers such as concepts, ideas and ideologies. See Roland Barthes, ‘Blue is in Fashion This Year’, in Michal Carter (ed.), The Language of Fashion, Berg, Oxford, 2006, pp. 42–55. 22 In feminist theory, for instance, the ‘other’ is a strategy of criticism, since the woman symbolizes the other to the male subject, but also a liberating component that enhances the difference (différance) within the female subject herself. Kristeva views femininity as a flag of protest against the patriarchal and symbolic male order. From a postcolonial point of view, the other is any culture not identified with European culture, such as Japan, which offers a cultural alternative to the European one. 23 For further reading about the collection Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body, see Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 1, p. 163. 24 Karen de Perthuis, ‘Breaking the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s Fashion Manifesto’, Fashion Theory, 24(5), 2019, p. 671. 25 Japanese tend to distinguish between Japanese clothes (wafuku) and Western clothes (Yōfuku). For reading about Kawakubo’s work by Western and Japanese researchers, see Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Centre, London, 2010, pp. 161–81; Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, Berg, Oxford, 2004, pp. 125–51; Bonnie English, ‘Fashion as Art: Postmodernist Japanese Fashion’, in Louise Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2006, pp. 29–40; and Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 1, pp. 141–208. 26 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 179.

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27 Amy de la Haye and Jeffrey Horsley, ‘Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons. Art of the In-Between’, Fashion Theory, 24(1), 2020, p. 129. 28 Kaji Yūsuke, ‘The Era of Individualisation of Expression: The 1960’s’, in Advertising History 1950–1990, exhibition catalogue, East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, Tokyo, 1993, p. 56. 29 Kathryn B. Hiesinger, ‘Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950’, in Kathryn B. Hiesinger and Felice Fischer (eds), Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1994, p. 19. 30 For more about the consumption during the bubble economy, see Karen Kelsey, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001, p. 81; Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (eds), Women Media and Consumption in Japan, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1995, pp. 27–37; and John Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1997, p. 41. 31 From the mid-1970s, companies in Japan began to shape their corporate image. The Seibu department store, for example, started promoting its new corporate image from 1975 by creating a new logo, emphasizing the store’s interior design, and creating an overall image strategy that was presented in all the mass media. Part of the new image was the creation of a museum of the art of the company. See Chizuko Ueno, ‘Seibu Department Store and Image Marketing; Japanese Consumerism in the Postwar Period’, in Kerrie L. MacPherson (ed.), Asian Department Stores, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1998, pp. 186–87. 32 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, St Louis, MO, 1981, p. 30, and note 4. 33 Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan, n. 30, pp. 68–84. 34 Expenditures on clothing in Japan jumped in a two-year period, going from 376.6 billion Yen in 1988 to 826.5 billion Yen in 1990. See Makoto Akabane and Saitō Maki, ‘Du matériel au spirituel – changement de société au Japon et son reflet dans la publicité après l’effondrement de la bulle speculative’, in Tching Kanehisa (ed.), Société et Publicité Nipponnes, Vol. 3, 2002, Editions You-Feng, Paris, pp. 1–28. 35 Richard Thornton, Japanese Graphic Design, Laurence King, London, 1991, p. 179. 36 Josh Sims, ‘Rei Kawakubo’, in Terry Jones (ed.), Rei Kawakubo, Taschen, Cologne, 2012 (first published in: i-D, The Expressionist Issue, No. 249, November 2004). 37 de Perthuis, ‘Breaking the Idea of Clothes’, n. 24, p. 661. 38 Vladimir Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, edited with an Introduction and Afterword by Slavoj Žižek, Verso, New York, 2002, p. 285. 39 de Perthuis, ‘Breaking the Idea of Clothes’, n. 24, p. 660. 40 Kawakubo’s work has been celebrated in many museum and gallery exhibitions, such as Mode et photo, an exhibition of Comme des Garçons photography at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1986; Three Voices: Franco Albini, Kris Ruhs, Rei Kawakubo, Paris, in 1993; and the

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Essence of Quality exhibition of Comme des Garçons Noir with the Kyoto Costume Institute, Kyoto, Japan, in 1993. She also held a furniture exhibition at the Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan. In 1995 she participated in the Mode and Art exhibition in Brussels, Belgium. In 1996 she participated in the Art and Fashion exhibition at the Florence Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea in Italy. Her work was also featured in the Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell and Rei Kawakubo exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, and in Radical Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001. This is not to mention, of course, the more recent Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017. 41 The first magazine reproduced a work by the Hungarian photojournalist André Kertész from 1938, entitled Rockefeller Centre, New York, which Comme des Garçons adopted for its 1988 Spring/Summer campaign. Issue number two, which was published along with Comme des Garçons’ Autumn/Winter 1988–9 collection, presented works by the German photographer and sculptor Karl Blossfeldt, as well as reproductions of Gilbert and George’s works of art. Other magazines featured works by Fischli and Weiss, Kishin Shinoyama, Louise Nevelson and The Boyle Family. 42 Peter McNeil, ‘Old Empire and New Global Luxury: Fashioning Global Design’, in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (eds), Global Design History, Routledge, New York, 2011, p. 147. 43 For more about the term ‘ostentatious poverty’, see Bella Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visibility, Open University Press, Maidenhead, 2004, p. 50. Bourdieu explains how people use style and taste to signify their own positions in social space. In his words, ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984, pp. 6, 169–225. He argues that ‘The producers are led by the logic of competition with other producers and by the specific interests linked to their position to produce distinct products which meet the different cultural interests’, pp. 230–35. He also deals with the distinction of taste between the upper and lower classes in their attitude to art and cultural consumption, pp. 260–95. See also Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, pp. 227–28; and Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan, n. 30, pp. 46–50. 44 These ideas regarding the symbolic inversion are inspired by Christine Guth’s article ‘Import Substitutions, Innovation and the Tea Ceremony in Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Japan’, which deals with the rise of wabi taste in ceramic design and commerce during that period. Although Comme des Garçons’ aesthetics are not inspired, in my opinion, by wabi aesthetics, it seems that its branding as a luxury product shares some similarities with the repositioning of wabi aesthetics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as described by Guth. See Christine Guth, ‘Import Substitutions, Innovation and the Tea Ceremony in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Japan’, in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (eds), Global Design History, Routledge, New York, 2011, pp. 50–8. 45 See such works of art as Artist’s Shit (1961) by Piero Manzoni.

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6 Rei Kawakubo: Defiance personified Yuniya Kawamura

When I was young, it was unusual for a female university graduate to do the same job as a man. And, of course, women didn’t earn the same. I rebelled against that. And when my fashion business started running well, people said I was not a professional because I was not a fashion school graduate … I rebelled against that as well. I never lose my ability to rebel. I get angry, and that anger certainly becomes a source of my energy. I wouldn’t be able to create anything if I stopped rebelling.1 Kawakubo says it explicitly in her rare in-depth interview with a Japanese fashion critic, Takeji Hirakawa. Defiance and rebellion have been her life philosophy and probably even her mission throughout her career, and her aggressive yet tacit and outwardly subtle attitude is reflected in her designs. While she herself keeps a low profile and rarely accepts interview requests, she makes an extremely strong statement to the public as well as industry professionals in her design collections. In this chapter, I explain more specifically how and why she personifies defiance and rebellion. Kawakubo is a nonconformist in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. We are drawn to her work because of her silent rebellion against the mainstream norms and values that many are afraid to go against. She goes against the social grain. Coming from a culture that promotes and encourages conformity, especially in her younger days, her hostile attitude against society is even more significant. As an old Japanese proverb says, ‘the nail that stands out is hammered down’. She has been that nail that stands out and is not

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afraid to take the heat. In Japanese society, if you have excessive exposure and do not act like everyone else, you are subject to criticism. The difference between a conformist and a nonconformist is the way a person sets their goal and the means they use to attain that goal. If either the means or the goal is not conventional, there is a sense of rebellion in the individual’s attitude and behaviour.2 Kawakubo created a new style characterized by monochromatic, asymmetrical and baggy looks. She has brought about a new type of creativity. Her designs are unconventional to say the least. She set the stage for the beginning of a new interpretation on the part of those who design clothes while breaking the boundary between West and East, fashion and anti-fashion and modern and anti-modern. Her creativity derives from her urge and desire to set herself apart from other groups. In a revealing interview with the world-famous fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, Kawakubo compares her new store the Dover Street Market New York with her other two stores in London and Tokyo in the following terms: For Dover Street Market New York, I wanted to keep the no-rule, beautiful chaos feeling of the first two Dover Street Markets … But, in contrast to New York itself, I wanted to design it with extreme simplicity, unsophisticated, almost primitive and with naïve artlessness.3

Defying the scripted role of a Japanese woman Many in the West assume that Paris was the first city in which she had shown her collections. She was somewhat known within the Japanese fashion industry prior to her arrival in Paris. She had already set up her own apparel company and brand Comme des Garçons in Japan in 1975 before going to Paris. Yet, it is often presumed in the West that Paris represented a departure point rather than a stage in her fashion career, and it is often used as a point of reference because she was unknown outside Japan until then. Being a female employer was still very unusual at the time, and taking a risk to go to Paris was considered an extremely bold and daring move. In Kawakubo’s biography, Deyan Sudjic explains that going to Paris was a long-term investment, and Kawakubo knew it would cost her a lot of money in the short term; but she was aware that, if she was to be regarded as a truly international designer, she would have to go to Paris as Western buyers and press were reluctant to make the trek to Tokyo to see Japanese designers’ collections.4 She brought five people with her from Japan and hired five models for the first Prêt-à-Porter show in Paris in April 1981 at the

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FIGURE 6.1   Yohji Yamamoto. Women’s Autumn/Winter 2020–1 Ready-to-Wear collection, Paris, 28 February 2020. Intercontinental hotel. Although the responses to her first show were largely either mixed or critical, it was provocative enough to shake the French fashion world and, along with Yohji Yamamoto, Kawakubo was on the French fashion trade federation’s list the following season. (See Figure 6.1.) Kawakubo moved quickly to establish a firm presence in France and opened her first store in Paris in 1982, a year after her first show in Paris. It was also her strategy to start manufacturing in France not only to ‘overcome the high retail prices created by a soaring yen’,5 but also to have a label that now read ‘Made in France’. About the aggressive style of her first show, Kawakubo simply says that it was ‘a little game to put ourselves on the map’.6 Her life story tells a great deal about her not wanting to play the given role in Japanese society for Japanese women, that is, to be a good mother and housewife.

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Labelled as avant-garde It was in the beginning of the 1980s that a new generation of Japanese designers became key players in the global fashion world of Paris, one of whom was Kawakubo along with Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. (See Figure 6.2.) They were lumped together as the Japanese Avant-Garde Designers. But Kawakubo says ‘We certainly have no desire to create a fashion threesome, but each of us has a strong urge to design new, individual clothes which are recognisably ours.’7 Kawakubo never likes to be labelled as a ‘Japanese’ designer. She is just a designer. Perhaps she does not like to be labelled at all in any way by society since labelling is a social identity determined by external surroundings.

FIGURE 6.2   Issey Miyake. Women’s Spring/Summer 1995 Ready-to-Wear collection, Paris, 4 November 1994.

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What exactly do we mean when a designer is labelled as part of an avantgarde? No one explains the term ‘avant-garde’ better than Diana Crane, an American fashion scholar. The term ‘avant-garde’ implies a cohesive group of artists who have a strong commitment to iconoclastic aesthetic values and reject both popular culture and middle-class aesthetics.8 They are generally in opposition to dominant social values or established artistic conventions. Kawakubo clearly wants to go against everything that exists in society. She finds it important not to be confined by tradition, custom or geography and to be free of any influences in expressing shapes, colours and textures. She challenges not only the conformity of Japanese society but also the norms of the Western clothes-making system. In her analysis of a new art movement, such as an avant-garde, Crane states that an art movement may be considered avant-garde in its approach to the aesthetic content of its artworks if it does any of the following: (1) redefines artistic conventions; (2) utilizes new artistic tools and techniques; and (3) redefines the nature of the art object, including the range of objects that can be considered artworks. All of these apply to styles that Kawakubo created. She abandoned the conventions of clothes-making altogether, invented different and original materials as clothing fabrics, and by doing so introduced and redefined the meaning and nature of both clothing and fashion. We can see from her designs that she opposes anything and everything that is conventional and ordinary. But at the same time she is aware of what the conventions are. In order to create things that are extraordinary and unconventional, we first need to know how and what conventions exist. Japan is a country that carries a great number of strong and rigid cultural norms that should not be violated. Once norms are violated, social sanctions are imposed. People abide by the norms in order to avoid these sanctions.

Going against normative ideas about female dress and fashion What is most striking is Kawakubo’s defiance against the typical image of a beautiful woman or an image that designers usually project of an idealized woman through their designs. Human beings play a role, and one’s role is the result of the effect of society and vice versa. The term ‘role’ is taken from the theatre as each actor artificially plays the role of someone else in a play, and human beings are socially assigned a role or multiple roles.9 A role is what or how society expects us to play and perform. Certain tasks are expected to be carried out based on the roles we play. Social conditions often force individuals

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to identify themselves in a given role, and there is a tendency to identify with that given role. And gender is one of the most obvious roles we play. Being aware of fixed gender roles, Kawakubo’s designs are known for being gender neutral, androgynous or unisex. She shows us that gender roles are determined only by social rules and regulations formed by society. Clothing constructs and deconstructs gender and gender differences and is a major symbol of the gender that allows other people immediately to discover the individual’s biological sex. She challenges the normative gender specificity that used to be one of the major characteristics of Western clothes. Furthermore, fashion is worn by a beautiful-looking model on a catwalk, who is often tall and thin and wearing proper make-up. In March 1983, Kawakubo presented a collection that included coat dresses, cut big and squared with no recognizable line, form or silhouette. Many had misplaced lapels, buttons and sleeves and mismatched fabrics. A more calculated disorganized look was created by knotting, tearing and slashing fabrics, which were crinkled, creased and woven in unusual textures. She never puts her models in high stiletto heels with pointed toes but slippers or square-toed rubber shoes that are rarely considered feminine or beautiful. The models in this collection had bruised blue on their lower lips as if to mock a woman’s heavy make-up. These works were interpreted as an expression of feminism. She designs for strong women who attract men with their minds rather than their bodies. Her designs are said to reflect Kawakubo herself, an independent woman, rejecting stereotypes of femininity and sexiness and blurring gender categories: ‘You don’t have to talk to me, look at the clothes and then you see, you know me, what I want to say is there.’10 (See Plate 8 in colour insert.)

Redefining fashion and beauty Along with other avant-garde Japanese designers, the idea and the definition of fashion that was often proposed by Western fashion, especially French haute couture, was overthrown by Kawakubo. Good quality clothing, i.e. fashion, was made out of perfectly woven and knitted fabric with proper interfacing and linings that were determined by traditional garment-making, draping, patternmaking, sewing and stitching, whether it was done by machine or hand. Every convention carries with it an aesthetic, according to which what is conventional becomes the standard by which artistic beauty and effectiveness is judged. This conception of fashion is synonymous with the conception of beauty. Therefore, an attack on a convention of fashion becomes an attack on the aesthetic related to it. By breaking the Western conventions of fashion, Kawakubo suggested a new style and a new definition of the aesthetic. Some French people took it as an offence not only against their aesthetic but also

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against their existing arrangement of ranked statuses, whether it be the stratification system in fashion or the hegemony of the French fashion system. Her cutting-edge concept that there is beauty in imperfection, and that clothing can go from texture to fabric, has had a major influence on today’s fashion. Kawakubo remarks: ‘I oppose trends so I want trends to exist.’11 Although she says ‘I don’t have a definition of beauty. I don’t have an establishment view of what beauty is, as my idea of beauty keeps changing’,12 one can find a common and consistent principle in her designs. For instance, she finds ‘beauty in the unfinished and the random … I want to see things differently to search for beauty. I want to find something nobody has ever found … It is meaningless to create something predictable.’13

Unconventional design processes Since the garment constructions of her clothes were not conventional, she had to teach factory seamstresses their way of sewing the pieces together, which conflicted with craft standards. A designer’s disregard for conventional production processes can create problems for craftspeople and sewers because of their unstandardized methods. It is not the designers who sew the final clothes in commercial fashion. In order to come up with unconventional designs, there needs to be people who cooperate in creating such products. For instance, Kawakubo’s clothes are deliberately designed to look worn and dishevelled, defying common sense and challenging notions of perfection. At first her work was regarded with revulsion, but this eventually gave way to amazement and admiration.14 Kawakubo challenges perfect symmetry and makes an attempt to destroy it. As she says: Machines that make fabric are more and more able to produce uniform, flawless textures. I like it when something is not perfect. Hand-weaving is the best way to achieve this, but since this isn’t always possible, we loosen a screw on the machines here and there so they can’t do exactly as they are supposed to.15 She throws doubt on the notion of perfection as something positive and beautiful and sheds light on things that are incomplete and imperfect. However, some designers find this unacceptable. A designer who works for another Japanese designer in Paris explains why: From a design and technical perspective, Kawakubo’s works are beyond our comprehension and also unbelievable for those of us who were professionally trained in fashion schools. Students are taught always to

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fold a hem about one inch in the case of a straight or semi-straight skirt, and about half an inch or even less for a flared skirt. Kawakubo would let  the edge of the skirt unravel without a hem and utilise it as part of her style.16 It becomes difficult for those who are trained to break the mould of the conventions that define a fine-quality garment. It is probably not a coincidence that Kawakubo was never trained as a designer. The production and technical process of a garment is more or less standardized, but there are no laws to regulate the production process of clothes. We do not live in an era where the production process of clothes is implemented by the guild system. Kawakubo is indeed organizationally innovative. Moreover, fabrics have become a very crucial element in Japanese designs, and Japanese avant-garde designers, including Kawakubo, often experiment with materials in various ways, such as mixing or matching natural and artificial fibres. The work is ensured strict confidentiality with regard to the weaving of the fabric and the way it is treated afterwards. There are no rules for what can be or should be used as fabric. Anything can be clothing fabric as long as it is harmless. For Kawakubo, textile manufacturers play a significant role in the making of a collection because the distinctive character of her clothes can be traced back to the selection of the thread used to weave the fabric from which the collection will be made. The method of communication for Kawakubo is the same with everyone. It is ambiguous and abstract. Her textile manufacturer who has been working with her for some time explains: ‘Between four and six months before a collection, she will call me to talk about what she has in mind  … Usually it’s a pretty sketchy conversation; sometimes it’s just a single word. It’s a particular mood that she is after, and that can come from anywhere.’17 He relies on his intuition to understand Kawakubo’s abstract theme and comes up with sample swatches. Their conversations go back and forth until they reach the exact fabric that Kawakubo has in mind. Moreover, Western clothing tends to be fitted to accentuate the contours of the body, and this is something she rejects. Kawakubo further explains that fashion design is not about revealing or accentuating the shape of a woman’s body. Rather, its purpose is to allow a person to be what they are. She comments on the Western obsession with fitted clothing: I don’t understand the term ‘body-conscious’ very well … I enter the process from an interest in the shape of the clothing and from the feeling of volume you get from the clothing, which is probably a little different from the pleasure Western women take in showing the shapes of their bodies. It bothers Japanese women … to reveal their bodies. I myself understand that feeling very well, and I take that into account, adding more material, or whatever. It feels like one would get bored with ‘body-conscious’ clothing.18

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Kawakubo has redefined the normative shape and silhouette of Western clothing. She has introduced large, loose-fitting garments such as jackets with no traditional construction and a minimum of detail or buttons. Her dresses often have a straight, simple shape, and her large coats with oversized proportions can be worn by both men and women. The conventions of not only garment construction but also the common-sense concepts of fashion have been challenged. All of this came at a time when women’s clothes by most traditional Western designers were moving in the opposite direction, towards a tighter fit and formality. Kawakubo’s view of fashion was diametrically opposed to conventional Western fashion, and it was not her intention to reproduce Western fashion in the first place. She interpreted Western sartorial conventions, which can be called a clothing system, by suggesting different ways of wearing a garment – there can be two neck holes instead of one or three sleeves instead of two – and leaving it up to a wearer to decide which hole or sleeve they want to wear. She has also redefined what clothes look like or can look like. (See Plate 4 in colour insert.)

Defiance legitimated and acknowledged by the fashion establishment No matter how defiant and rebellious Kawakubo’s messages may have been, she was always well aware that they must still be legitimated and acknowledged by the fashion authorities in the establishment. Kawakubo is considered one of the most successful and internationally known Japanese designers in the West. She has solidified her position in the French fashion establishment. Fashion professionals recognize and accept her achievement because of the ‘Japaneseness’ reflected in her designs, and many have called it ‘Japanese fashion’ only because these clothes were not definitely Western with regard to construction, silhouette, shapes, prints and fabric combinations. Her uniqueness lies in the ways she has deconstructed the existing rules of clothing and reconstructed her own interpretation of what fashion is and what fashion can be. She has proven first to Paris, and then to the world, that she is a master of fashion design, proposing that Western societies reassess and redefine the concepts of clothing and fashion and also the universality of beauty. She was able to surprise fashion professionals in the West by revealing something none of them had seen before. The idea of newness is a vital element in fashion, although it should never be an end in itself. All new things are often considered eccentric at first. Kawakubo explains why newness is important: I would like the audience to feel their heart beat. I want them to feel something when they wear my clothes. If they don’t feel anything when

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they wear my clothes, my creations are meaningless. That is to say, my clothes have to be new. My greatest fear is that I won’t be able to create anything new. I always have that fear.19 It is crucial for an individual designer and also for any profit-making business to be acknowledged and legitimated by the gatekeepers of the fashion world. Kawakubo was still known only within a limited fashion circle in Japan before she came to Paris. In order to extend her influence beyond the confines of Japan, she needed professional guidance and association with the French world and admission into and acceptance by the Paris fashion institutions. The fashion world in Paris is a channel that transmits new designers to the world, and she strategically utilized the system to her advantage. Although she was formerly marginal to the fashion centre, once her defiance was validated, she became the focus of both negative and positive attention. Therefore, one thing she did not defy was the authority of fashion itself, that is, Paris as the fashion capital of the world and those who are involved in the world of French fashion. She was the first Japanese female Prêt-àPorter designer to have a presence in Paris fashion. It appeared that she had emerged to international prominence from nowhere and her success was instantaneous, but, in fact, she had carefully planned her entry into the French fashion system, and she still strategically crafts her presence in this system today.

Notes 1 Kawakubo cited in Takeji Hirakawa, ‘Comme des Garçons’, GAP Magazine (Tokyo), 1990, p. 21. 2 Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, New York, 1957. 3 Suzy Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary: Rei Kawakubo is about to Redefine Shopping in New York City’, New York Times, 6 December 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/t-magazine/rei-kawakubo-dover-streetmarket.html) accessed 16 November 2021. 4 Deyan Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 53. 5 Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo, n. 4, p. 54. 6 Olivier Séguret, ‘Les Japonais’, Madame Air France 5 (Paris), 1990, p. 141. 7 Séguret, ‘Les Japonais’, n. 6, p. 141. 8 Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World 1940–1985, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 1.

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9 George Mead, ‘The Social Self’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 10, 1913, pp. 374–80. 10 Kawakubo cited in Terry Jones, I-D, The Glamour Issue, May 1992, p. 72. 11 Kawakubo cited in Hirakawa, ‘Comme des Garçons’, n. 1, p. 44. 12 Hirakawa, ‘Comme des Garçons’, n. 1, p. 71. 13 Hirakawa, ‘Comme des Garçons’, n. 1, p. 24. 14 François Baudot, Fashion: The Twentieth Century, Universe, New York, 1990. 15 Kawakubo cited in Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo, n. 4, p. 80. 16 Cited in Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, Bloomsbury, London, 2004, pp. 133–34. 17 Cited in Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo, n. 4, pp. 28–9. 18 Kawakubo cited in Dorienne Kondo, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Japanese Identity in the Fashion Industry’, in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Re-Made in Japan, Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1992, p. 124. 19 Hirakawa, ‘Comme des Garçons’, n. 1, p. 24.

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7 Exploring the theoretical meaning of Rei Kawakubo: Two waves of Japanese fashion in the West and Georg Simmel’s fashion dualism Tets Kimura

Introduction Japan’s indigenous kimono has a flattened ‘distinctive T-shape’, and is made of ‘straight-edged pieces of cloth sewn edge to edge, resulting in vertical or horizontal seams, with the exception of the sleeve, bottoms, collar and lapels’.1 The fundamental design philosophy is different from the West where people find ‘the body’s shape as the basis for the construction of clothes’.2 On the surface of the kimono textile, various designs such as geometric patterns and flora and fauna are embroidered or tinctured (or dyed); kimono fabrics represent the canvas of art paintings.3 Due to Japan’s location in the Far East and its sakoku seclusion policy for centuries until the middle of the  nineteenth century, the arrival of Japanese fashion was next to zero in the West. An exception was a small number of kimonos called the ‘Japanese robe’ brought into Europe from the seventeenth century by the traders of the Dutch East India Company, which had been granted limited trading rights. The Japanese costumes were used only as an ‘at-home dress’,4 although

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today Japanese  fashion is well-integrated into a Western-dominated world of fashion. This is attributed to two waves of Japanese fashion. The first wave took place in line with Japonisme (the term first used in the 1870s after Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868), and the second wave was the recognition of Japanese fashion designers in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s. In order to assess the theoretical meaning of Rei Kawakubo, who put on her epic inaugural show in Paris in 1981, this chapter will critically explain the two waves of Japanese fashion arrivals first, and reveal to what extent they influenced the West. Attention will be paid to Georg Simmel’s fashion dualism, which acknowledges the two simultaneous fashion movements of an ‘adaptation to the social group’ and an ‘individual elevation from it’.5 Although Kawakubo has contributed to the later condition, this could be due merely to her exoticism, rather than any proper appreciation of her aesthetics.

The first wave: The export of Japanese culture and aesthetics Japan’s isolation ended in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pressure from Western powers made Japan open its borders, which consequently led to the modernization of Japan. While Japan’s feudal pre-modern society had some elements of modernity (such as the development of urban culture), it was now under constant pressure to catch up with the Euro–American advantage.6 The Japanese elite was sent to various Western countries to learn modern Western technologies and political and institutional systems. In order to demonstrate that Japan was as modern and advanced as the West, there was a government-led modernization policy to adopt Western sartorial culture. Japanese white-collar workers were required to wear Western business suits to work, and this sartorial adaptation was a ‘near-perfect imitation of American and European clothing’.7 However, at home many Japanese men as well as their wives and children still wore kimonos. Meiji Japan was a time when indigenous and Western cultures slowly but surely merged, causing it to create wayosetchu (a mixture of Japanese and Western) culture. Although the ‘flow’ of Meiji modernity was mostly the importation of Western technologies, values and culture to Japan, this was also the time when Japanese culture and aesthetics began to be exported to the West. Japan now joined the international network and, according to Jennifer Harris, ‘the discovery of Japan and its art in the nineteenth century was an international phenomenon’.8 Arty products such as ceramics, exquisite decorative arts, paintings and prints arrived in the West.9 Newly discovered Japan was introduced at various exhibitions, leading to the ‘allure of Japanese

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culture’.10 The exportation of Japanese aesthetics was contributed to by Westerners who stayed in Japan. Western scholars and specialists were invited to teach in Japan, enticed by a handsome salary. Some were attracted to Japanese culture, and consequently became ambassadors of it. Ernest Fenollosa, a famous example, taught Western philosophy in Japan, and soon became a collector. His some 1,000 painting collection was housed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he worked as a curator before becoming a professor at Columbia University.11 In Europe, famous artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Mortimer Menpes adopted Japanese art practice, which was more abstract than its European counterpart of realism. The absence of shades and shadows, the distortion of perspective and the use of primary colours were all anomalous to Western artists.12 In particular, the Australian-born, London-based painter Menpes travelled and became ‘Japan-inspired’,13 despite his extensive travel experience to other ‘exotic locations’.14 According to the English-speaking artist, ‘an English artist familiar with all the most modern methods of his craft in Europe could not but learn much by a sojourn in Japan, could not but bring back with him a wider knowledge and a riper experience’.15 Menpes was fond of the ‘sumptuous colours of Japan’16 and developed his own way to convey Japanese colours. The boom of Japan went beyond art, penetrating everyday aesthetics to become a subject of consumption. As Lionel Lambourne writes in his Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West, ‘Japanese motifs spread like a rash on everything from cheap trays to biscuit boxes’.17 According to Rosemary Smith, Japonisme ‘soon became Japan-mania as numerous import shops opened, stocked with affordable goods’.18 The Japanese word ‘kimono’ first appeared untranslated in France in 1876.19 Consequently, Japanese costumes such as kimonos, sunshades and ornamental accessories became a popular choice at fancy dress balls.20 Shapes and patterns of Japanese flora (such as plum blossoms, cherry blossoms, irises, wisteria, chrysanthemums and rice plants) and fauna (such as sparrows, swallows, cranes and carps), embroidered, printed or painted on Japanese fabrics, china and artworks, were used on Western clothes. For those who were less fortunate, fans, in particular, were affordable so were bought and used frivolously and flirtatiously.21 From reading Kiyokazu Washida’s book on Japan,22 there are two waves of arrivals of Japanese fashion that can be seen as equally important to the Western fashion world. This was the first arrival. Although some Japanese kimonos imported to the West were used as a raw fabric to create new Western clothes, it was also trendy for upper-class women to wear the kimono in a Western way as a robe.23 Akiko Fukai argues that this is illustrated in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of Madame Hénriot (1882), who wears a kimono on top of her Western dress. However, it was not worn

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the way a kimono should have been worn with tightly overlapping edges, but was opened to the waist.24 This indicates that, although there was a degree of Japanese fashion adoption in Europe, ‘Japan’s influence in fashion was limited [to] the introduction of Japanese-style motifs and the adaptation of silk weaving techniques and stencil dyeing to execute them … the clothes themselves remained essentially European in form.’25 Japanese indigenous costumes were utilized and manipulated by their Western consumers. (See Figure 7.1.) This is understandable considering that Japonisme was driven by exoticism, rather than a deep appreciation of Japanese culture and aesthetics. For example, such Vincent van Gogh paintings as The Bridge in the Rain (1887) and The Flowering Plum Tree (1887) were heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e,

FIGURE 7.1   Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Portrait of Madame Henriot, 1882.

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and oriental-looking characters were used as a decoration around the paint. However, he only used the characters in terms of design and look, without knowing their original cultural contexts. Similarly, in such Menpes works as Flower of the Tea (1887–8), Sun and Lanterns (1887–8), Alone in a Shoe Shop (1887–8) and Japanese Street Scene (1887–8), the Japanese writing that appears in urban scenes is imitated, not written – it is clear that Menpes was unable to read and write Japanese characters. Without a sufficient linguistic understanding of Japan, the adoption of Japanese aesthetics was generally stylistic, rather than philosophical; thus the linguistic skills to understand narratives and perspectives of Japan were not required. Unfortunately, most Western artists in the late nineteenth century who were influenced by Japan did not have a comprehensive understanding of Japanese culture. Rather, it was a superficial perception of the country and its people. Furthermore, due to the high demand of Japanese items in the West, Japan eventually introduced mass-machine production systems imported from the West to export literally millions of ‘something Japanese’ to Western consumers – but the shift from handmade to machine resulted in a decline in quality.26 Japanese fans, which had arrived in Europe as fashionable items in the 1860s, were used as free promotional gifts in advertising by the end of the century.27 By the 1910s, after Japan’s victory against China and Russia that led to the expansion of Imperial Japan within East Asia, Japan became an important international player. The ‘new’ Asian country now became a potential threat rather than something exotic to the West. The ‘confident mood’28 brought about by Western expansion in the nineteenth century did not continue into the twentieth century. Japan experienced little damage in the First World War, whereas most European countries needed to rebuild their infrastructures from ash. There was no longer room to admire Japan. The unique looks that had attracted Western consumers were no longer attractive – leading to the end of Japonisme, which, after all, was the appreciation of Japanese culture as a Western convenience. Therefore, it is said that Japonisme contains Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’,29 by which a Western hegemony allows the objectification of ‘other’ non-Western cultures.

The second wave: Revolution, destruction and anti-fashion With the end of Japonisme, there was no notable influence of Japanese fashion on the West for half a century. Japan underwent a dark military-driven imperial era, which ended with defeat in the Second World War. The history of

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the new democratized Japan started with the Allied occupation (1945–52). This meant that the wider Japanese population had direct contact with Western culture for the first time in its history. Ordinary Japanese people realized the extent of Western/American popular cultural and material wealth. In fashion, the normalization of Western fashion accelerated; the average Japanese person started wearing Western clothes at home. Basic Western clothing such as a skirt, blouse and dress became worn comfortably by Japanese urban women,30 and by the 1960s the shift from the kimono to Western clothing was complete.31 The second wave of the arrival of Japanese fashion occurred after all of these; Japanese fashion designers, such as Kenzo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, ‘appeared’ in the world’s fashion capital of Paris in the 1970s and 1980s.32 Although ‘new Japonisme’33 and ‘neo-Japonisme’34 have been proposed by Japanese fashion scholars as new terminology, neither word has entered widespread use. In the 1980s and 1990s in the West, Japanese popular culture, including anime, manga, computer games, pop music, food and fashion design, was certainly gaining popularity. However, the second wave of Japanese fashion was only driven by the arrival of three or four Japanese designers. It did not occur as a consequence of a comprehensive cultural movement as seen in the nineteenth century. However, its significance within the Western fashion world was intense; it ‘tossed all Western preconceptions and assumptions about fashion up into the air’.35 Naturally, this has been studied more widely,36 not just by the Japanese, but also by scholars from English-speaking countries, such as Bonnie English,37 Patricia Mears38 and Yuniya Kawamura.39 English, whose research focus is on the ‘big three’,40 argues that ‘there are countless examples in the history of art that evidence how the West has been informed by the East but none quite as dramatic as in the history of contemporary fashion design’.41 They are ‘known for “challenging” the West’s dominance in fashion – by avoiding vivid colours, employing new synthetic materials such as polyester and applying traditional Japanese folding techniques [as] seen in the kimono and origami to present modern two-dimensional designs’.42 As one of the earliest fashion scholars, Herbert Spencer, acknowledges, ‘ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent’.43 Even today, more than thirty-five years after they first ‘arrived’ in Paris, the ongoing impact of the Japanese designers is still being accredited. The Future Beauty exhibition, for example, was held in five different cities in Europe, North America and Australia between 2010 and 2015 precisely in order to introduce the works of the big three designers. And in 2017 the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum in New York put on Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between. The platform of their success had been established by the ‘arrivals’ of preceding Japanese designers such as Hanae Mori and Kenzo. For example,

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Mori established her name after putting on her East Meets West collection in 1965 in New York, and she became an official member of Paris haute couture in 1977.44 She achieved the ‘ultimate designer status in Paris’45 by ‘not breaking the system of Western clothing or the concept of aesthetics’.46 To maintain the  ultimate in luxury and beauty, Japanese inspiration was seen in Mori’s design as coming from Japanese high culture. (See Plate 9 in colour insert.) The challenge to the Western fashion world (although the intention of the Japanese designers was most likely simply to show their designs rather than challenge per se) began with Kenzo. He, just like Mori, ‘recycled’ Japanese kimono fabrics; moreover, he used traditional Japanese stitching and quilting techniques. What makes Kenzo different from Mori is that Kenzo used an ‘exotic’ aesthetic because it sold, and even went beyond Japanese exoticism.47 Kawamura argues that Kenzo was not as radical as the big three.48 Rather, ‘he happened to be in the right place at the right time’49 as there was the formation and casualization of the French fashion system in the 1960s through to the 1970s. It is said that ‘his major contribution to all Japanese designers was to let them know that even a non-Western outsider can gain status by using Paris as a base’.50 Being Japanese even became a ‘strength and weapon’ in Paris.51 In the early works of fashion theory, such as those by Herbert Spencer and Thorstein Veblen, fashion trends are understood to be the imitation of the upper class by those of lower social status. Spencer, for example, finds a link between manners and fashion: ‘Manners originate by imitation of the behaviour pursued towards the greatest; fashion originates by imitation of the behaviour of the great.’52 The notion of imitation was further emphasized in Veblen’s famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class.53 In fact, ‘for centuries, Western fashion … extolled the virtues of sexuality, glamour and status’,54 and these elements have been the subject of ‘conspicuous consumption’, the phrase coined by Veblen. Colin McDowell mentions that Japanese designers ‘made few connections to traditional western ideals of dress’,55 and this is classified as anti-fashion.56 Fashion by the Japanese suppressed the function of status and sexuality, and embraced ‘the idea that fashion can assimilate meaning and conjure up memories of place, time, people and feelings’.57 Fashion can be modern and rooted in Japanese heritage at the same time.58 For example, the big three designers ‘have all commented during their lengthy careers that the kimono is the basis of their fashion design’59; and, by adopting the T-shape design used in the kimono, a gender-neutral approach took place, because the shape has traditionally been used for both genders in Japan. Sexuality is not overtly expressed through clothes in traditional Japan. While associating themselves with Japan’s indigenous culture, Japanese designers also embraced ‘new technological developments and methodologies in textile design’.60 Japanese designers were therefore faithful to two faces of

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Japan: Japan as a traditional country; and the other Japan that offers advanced technologies. The Western counterpart does not have this sort of relation to fashion; instead, their design motivations are typically linked to fashion trends and predictions. In fact, the big three are known as niche, not following stylistic trends; thus, their products exist ‘between fashion and art’.61 Among these Japanese designers, Miyake is ‘pioneering east–west synthesis in fashion’,62 and is the first contemporary fashion designer to be acknowledged as making art.63 (See Figure 7.2.) Under the concept of ‘piece of cloth’, he has made ‘clothes made from a rectangular piece of cloth, wrapped and tied’ to be worn.64 Multiple layers of kimonos are used to decorate the body of Japanese people traditionally, and this concept of ‘layered’ clothes was introduced to the West.65 Later in his career, Miyake finds clothes as ‘a type of second skin’, by which ‘he wanted to work with the body in motion and wanted the clothes to move as the body moved’.66 English argues that Miyake ‘created the most intricate and sophisticated pleats to date’, because there was no need for sewing.67 However, there are criticisms for being too unconventional as his clothes are quite difficult to wear. (See Figure 7.3.) It might be difficult to separate Yamamoto and Kawakubo as they ‘share the same vision, the same heritage, the same ambitions and the same philosophy’ and ran fashion shows together in their early professional lives.68

FIGURE 7.2   Issey Miyake. Spring collection show, Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, New York, 4 November 1982.

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FIGURE 7.3   Issey Miyake, Ensemble/Pleats Please, c. 1994. (See Figure 7.4.) They were ‘discovered’ after their famous 1981 show in Paris. Although their ‘black, draped and asymmetric’69 designs were ‘dubbed a “fashion revolution” by the international press’,70 some journalists and buyers were initially angered by deconstructed fashion items made by Japanese; it was Americans who first appreciated them and brought them from Japan to the West.71 Yamamoto and Kawakubo, who originally deconstructed fashion, eventually became ‘the realm of fashion’.72 The success of Yamamoto and Kawakubo could be seen as similar to Britain’s punk. However, while punk can be ‘discussed within the context of a generational protest’, Japanese fashion was ‘realised in a more passive and discreet way’.73 For example, the black introduced by Yamamoto and Kawakubo was considered to be signifying

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FIGURE 7.4   Yohji Yamamoto. Paris collection, Spring/Summer 1984.

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‘dignity and pathos’ in the West, but was a symbol of ‘secrecy, stealth and cunning’ in Japan.74 It took time for Western consumers to understand that the black offered by the Japanese could have different philosophical notions because they did not actively advocate their point. As such, Japanese designers did not speak as much as punk did – but black became internationally common ‘streetwear as well as evening wear from the early 1980s onwards’,75 notably in New York’s Soho-based arts community.76 In fact, black was actually many shades of dark indigo blue, commonly used in traditional Japan, but looked like black due to its multiple layers. Furthermore, by the late 1980s, both Yamamoto and Kawakubo became influential on men’s fashion as well. By removing the padded shoulders, creating large armholes and other radical approaches, there was a ‘significant contribution to the international “new look”’.77 This contribution to men’s fashion was more evident in Yamamoto.78 Although Yamamoto and Kawakubo are often seen as opposite sides of the same coin, they in fact have different degrees of engagement with fashion. Yamamoto is a ‘highly skilled draper and tailor who often works out his ideas technically, the process of dressmaking being his tool-of-choice throughout the entire act of creation’.79 His mother was a seamstress; fashion was inherited by him. On the other hand, Kawakubo is ‘originally innovative’,80 and her ‘conceptualisation is inherent to her philosophy towards design as she always attempts to project forwards to the future, pushing boundaries’.81 Her ideas are often ‘very abstract’ and ‘her team of expert craftspeople build upon her elusive aesthetic vision’,82 and this is most likely to be linked to the fact that she has no formal training in fashion. Furthermore, ‘Kawakubo has a total commitment towards a holistic design process … shop interiors, advertising and graphic design are all part of a singular vision and inextricably linked.’83 She does not just design her clothes but her company. The object of fashion is to sell, and where possible in large amounts. The absence of Western heritage, limited awareness of its fashion culture, and no formal design knowledge, in fact act as advantages for Kawakubo. With the already built-up reputation of Japanese designers, Kawakubo’s shocking approach to fashion was fortunately ‘discovered’ in the Western fashion world. Today, almost all major fashion designers cite Kawakubo as a source of inspiration.84

Conclusion: Distinction, exoticism and what else? There is no doubt that the Japanese designers have left significant footsteps in the history of Western fashion. The fashion ideas introduced by them have been chosen as one of ‘100 ideas that changed fashion’,85 among such other

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inventions as the bra and zip and the establishment of Vogue magazine. Mears even believes that the significance of Yamamoto and Kawakubo’s contributions is ‘underrated’.86 The inclination of the charismatic Japanese designers can be explained by Georg Simmel (1858–1918), whose work is seen as the ‘only true attempt at a general theory of fashion’, with his century-old ideas not yet out of date.87 Unlike such other classic fashion scholars as Spencer and Veblen, Simmel believed that fashion no longer originated in the upper class only. Fashion is a coexistence of two contradictory movements: ‘adaptation to the social group’ and ‘individual elevation from it’.88 Within this theory of imitation– distinction dualism, ‘two social tendencies are essential to the establishment of fashion’, and when one of these tendencies is absent ‘fashion will not be formed’.89 To maintain the second condition, fashion can have an ‘exotic origin … in some societies and eras, a sub-group might borrow a feature from a completely different society’.90 Fashion items may offer extra value when they are ‘imported’ from a foreign land.91 Simmel explains that, ‘because of their external origin, these imported fashions create a special and significant form of socialization … It sometimes appears as though social elements, just like the axes of vision, converge best at a point that is not too near.’92 Exotic Japanese designs that arrived around 1980 were adopted and adapted as a method of expressing distinctive individualities. The unknown exotic designers from Japan became well-incorporated within the Western fashion world, and the aesthetic of ‘black, draped and asymmetric’93 has been established as the stereotypical image of Japanese fashion. However, despite the image and success, Yamamoto admits that their style is ‘the far edge of things’, and that it has ‘nothing to do with the ordinary people [of Japan]’.94 Mears mentions ‘the reality was that those loose, dark, and seemingly tattered garments were as equally startling to the average Japanese citizen as they were to the Western audience’.95 To support the point, I have witnessed an elite Japanese journalist from a Japanese newspaper being surprised at the Future Beauty exhibition in which the big three designers were shown as conventionally Japanese.96 As such, it seems illogical to label these styles as Japanese. Reading the materials written by English, Mears and Kawamura, which contain many interviews, all the big three designers appear to experience an identity crisis. Artist or not an artist, ‘Japanese’ designer or just a designer, they have different identities in different times. As much as the media is unclear about them, they seem to be unclear as to who they are  –  and this makes me believe they are not necessarily ‘Japanese’ designers, as desired by the Western fashion world. One truth about these ‘Japanese’ fashion designers is, apart from Mori, none of them were well known before moving and receiving recognition in Paris. In this regard, they are Parisian rather than Japanese.97 Furthermore, according to Mears, in terms of design, creativity and innovation, the only Japanese

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designer who has followed the pathway of Kawakubo (and Yamamoto) is Junya Watanabe.98 Watanabe, often seen as a youngster, is already well into his sixties, and if nobody else had followed them, the significant impact of the second wave might have just been a flash of sensation in the long history of sartorii and clothes. Certainly, no younger generation after the big three has achieved the same status,99 and a third wave has not yet been seen more than forty years after the second wave. Another critical point is that, if Kawakubo’s fashion is truly beautiful, why did she have to go through ‘a long-term investment’ by moving to Paris, to enable her clothes to be ‘Made in France’?100 If anything is intrinsically beautiful, its origin should not matter, but Kawakubo could only have advanced her reputation by moving to Paris. This shows that the role of the image, such as that of Paris, is huge in the fashion world. In fact, their successes could not have happened without the media’s involvement in creating positive images of revolutionary Japanese designers. What if Kawakubo was not Japanese and her name was, say, Dubois? The mixed associations of anti-Japaneseness (which was still present in the early 1980s), exotic Japan and perhaps the mysterious Asiatic women’s image created earlier by Yoko Ono (she was attaining her unique and charismatic status around 1980 in line with John Lennon’s unexpected death) have all allowed the female Japanese designer to create ‘unfashionable’ products. Shortly after the 1981 show, there was both positive and negative feedback; ‘Fashion Pearl Harbour’101 was a term used at the time. However, there was not even a ‘Pearl Harbour’ if she came from ‘our’ side. The revolution could just have been ignored altogether, or taken as a mosquito’s bite, which people forget after a few hours. Furthermore, as is claimed by the current Japanese government, if fashion belongs to the creative industries, as shown in today’s ‘Cool Japan’ policy, the object is to generate profit. However, Hiroshi Narumi argues that the success by the Japanese designers has only been artistic and not financial; they are not a commercial threat to their Western counterparts, and what appears to be ‘success’ in the West ‘allows them only to survive in their local markets’.102 For example, the proportion of Miyake’s income in terms of Japanese domestic sales is as high as 80 per cent.103 Japanese aesthetics and designs are ‘amongst the favourites of designers and journalists’,104 but this does not necessarily attract consumers. After all, according to Narumi, due to a lack of comprehensive understanding, the second wave is ‘still deeply connected to the Orientalising gaze’.105 As illustrated by Simmel, fashion from other cultures can be treated as cool. Other than through financial success (although this type of success can be the ultimate success in the fashion world), Japanese designers have engraved their names in fashion history. Could the same achievements have taken place if the exact same ‘black, draped and asymmetric’106 aesthetics were shown in 1981 by a French designer? I am sceptical.

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Notes 1 Alan Kennedy, Japanese Costume: History and Tradition, Adam Biro, Paris, 1990, p. 6. This book contains 156 illustrations of traditional Japanese clothes and designs. 2 Kennedy, Japanese Costume, n. 1, p. 6. 3 Visual samples are available in Kennedy, Japanese Costume, n. 1. 4 See Akiko Fukai, ‘Mode no Japonism’, Kyoto Costume Institute, 1996, pp. 2, 4 (http://www.kci.or.jp/research/dresstudy/pdf/Fukai_Japonism_in_ Fashion.pdf) accessed 6 November 2021. See also Akiko Fukai, Japonism in Fashion: Umi wo Watatta Kimono, Heibonsha, Tokyo, 1994, p. 22. 5 Michael Carter, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes, Berg, Oxford, 2003, p. 66. 6 Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank, East Asia: The Great Tradition, Allen & Unwin, London, 1958, p. 601. See also René Grousset, The Civilizations of the East, Cooper Square Publishers, New York, 1967. 7 Toby Slade, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History, Berg, Oxford, 2009, p. 19. 8 Jennifer Harris and Julie Robinson, ‘Japanese Street Scene, 1887–88’, in Julie Robinson (ed.), The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, p. 70. 9 Rosemary Smith, ‘Japan and Beyond’, in Julie Robinson (ed.), The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, p. 55. 10 Smith, ‘Japan and Beyond’, n. 9, p. 55. 11 See ‘Ernest F. Fenollosa’, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2015 (http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/204302/Ernest-F-Fenollosa) accessed 20 October 2021. 12 See Fukai, Japonism in Fashion, n. 4, p. 194. 13 Julie Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in Julie Robinson (ed.), The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, p. 13. 14 Nick Mitzevich, ‘Foreword’, in Julie Robinson (ed.), The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, p. 9. 15 Mortimer Menpes, ‘A Personal View of Japanese Art: A lesson from Khiosi’, The Magazine of Art 11, 1888, p. 192. 16 Smith, ‘Japan and Beyond’, n. 9, p. 60. 17 Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West, Phaidon, London, 2005, p. 109. 18 Smith, ‘Japan and Beyond’, n. 9, p. 55. 19 Fukai, ‘Mode no Japonism’, n. 4, p. 4. 20 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, n. 17, p. 127. 21 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, n. 17, p. 110.

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22 Kiyokazu Washida, Hitowa Naze Fukuwo Kirunoka, NHK Shuppan, Tokyo, 1998 (see ‘Hybrid to iu Gensho’, pp. 65–77). 23 Akiko Fukai, ‘Nichifutsu Koryu no Naka no Text Style: Japonism to Mode to Shitenkara’, Ochanomizu University, 2010 (http://teapot.lib.ocha.ac.jp/ocha/ bitstream/10083/49580/1/09_53-63.pdf) accessed 28 September 2021. 24 Fukai, ‘Mode no Japonism’, n. 4, p. 4. See also Fukai, Japonism in Fashion, n. 4, pp. 64–7. 25 Fukai, ‘Mode no Japonism’, n. 4, p. 6. 26 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, n. 17, pp. 112, 116. 27 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, n. 17, p. 117. 28 Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 356. 29 Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon, New York, 1978. 30 Michael Furmanovsky, ‘A Complex Fit: The Remaking of Japanese Femininity and Fashion, 1945–65’, Intercultural Studies 16, 2012, pp. 43–65. 31 Shunsuke Tsurumi, Sengo Nihon no Taishu Bunkashi: 1945–1980, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1984. 32 See Washida, Hitowa Naze Fukuwo Kirunoka, n. 22, pp. 68–9. 33 Hiroshi Narumi, ‘Fashion Orientalism and the Limits of Counter Culture’, Postcolonial Studies 3(3), 2000, p. 316. 34 Fukai, ‘Modo no Japonism’, n. 4, p. 9. 35 Harriet Worsley, 100 Ideas that Changed Fashion, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2011, p. 181. 36 In fact, Fukai is the only one who has undertaken notable study on the first wave. 37 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, Berg, Oxford, 2011. 38 Patricia Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution: Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Japan Fashion Now, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2010, pp. 141–207. 39 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, Berg, Oxford, 2004. 40 Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. See Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 127. 41 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 1. 42 Tets Kimura, ‘A Discourse of Japanese Fashion “Discovered”?’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 15(1), 2015, p. 130. 43 Herbert Spencer, ‘On Manners and Fashion’, in Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects, ed. Charles Eliot, Everyman’s Library, London, 1963 (1854), p. 234. 44 Fukai, Japonisme in Fashion, n. 4, p. 242. 45 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 151. 46 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 157.

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47 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 115. 48 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 123. 49 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 118. 50 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 120. 51 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 97. 52 Spencer, ‘On Manners and Fashion’, n. 43, p. 219. 53 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, MacMillan, London, 1899. 54 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 41. 55 Colin McDowell, McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1987, p. 178. 56 Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Infra-Apparel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1993. 57 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, pp. 73–4. 58 Valerie Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Japan Fashion Now, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2010, p. 17. 59 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 4. 60 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 6. 61 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 6. 62 Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 58, p. 16. 63 Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 58, pp. 17–18. 64 Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 58, p. 17. 65 Fukai, ‘Mode no Japonism’, n. 4, p. 224. 66 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 9. 67 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 12. 68 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 37. 69 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 109. 70 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 38. 71 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, pp. 186–87. 72 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 192. 73 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 40. 74 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 45. 75 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 45. 76 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 171. 77 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, pp. 51–2. 78 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 65. 79 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 157. 80 Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, n. 39, p. 134. 81 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 74. 82 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 157. 83 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 83.

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84 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 67. 85 Worsley, 100 Ideas that Changed Fashion, n. 35. 86 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 142. 87 Sergion Benvenuto, ‘Fashion: Georg Simmel’, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 3(2), 2000 (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/3/2/forum/2. html) accessed 6 November 2021. 88 Carter, Fashion Classics, n. 5, p. 66. 89 Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterly 10, 1904, p. 137; and Georg Simmel, ‘The Philosophy of Fashion’ (1905), in Simmel on Culture, p. 192 (http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/ system/20110511/20110511212815897.pdf) accessed 20 October 2021. 90 Benvenuto, ‘Fashion: Georg Simmel’, n. 87. 91 In Japanese Fashion, Slade finds that this was a case among the Japanese elites of Meiji and Taisho eras (n. 7, p. 152). 92 Simmel, ‘Fashion’, n. 89, p. 136. 93 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 109. 94 Leonard Koren, New Fashion Japan, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1984, p. 89. 95 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, p. 143. 96 Kimura, ‘A Discourse of Japanese Fashion “Discovered”?’, n. 42, p. 130. 97 Kimura, ‘A Discourse of Japanese Fashion “Discovered”?’, n. 42, p. 132. 98 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 38, pp. 195–96. 99 NHK, Tokyo Kawaii TV, NHK Sogo, 15 September 2012. 100 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 76. 101 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 38. 102 Narumi, ‘Fashion Orientalism and the Limits of Counter Culture’, n. 33, p. 322. 103 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 17. 104 Narumi, ‘Fashion Orientalism and the Limits of Counter Culture’, n. 33, p. 322. 105 Narumi, ‘Fashion Orientalism and the Limits of Counter Culture’, n. 33, p. 315. 106 English, Japanese Fashion Designers, n. 37, p. 109.

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8 The subversively cute side of Comme des Garçons: Rei Kawakubo and romantic transgression Masafumi Monden

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n the process of researching a new book I came across some images in a magazine from the 1970s that many people have found surprising. In one image, two young women are standing in a plain field, against a distant horizon. The girls are garbed in simple, white cotton pinafore dresses with two tiers. One flows above the knee, reminiscent of a simple tutu dress that a ballet student might wear. The second makes a tight silhouette, cascading down to just above the ankle. The girls’ hair is hidden under poke bonnet-style white hats. Published in 1973 in the Japanese women’s fashion magazine an an, and appropriately titled ‘The Peasant Look’, on the surface there is nothing surprising in the photographs of these highly romantic, girlish, folkloric dresses, which were like a modern-day reincarnation of iconic French Queen Marie Antoinette promenading in her verdant sanctum Petite Trianon. Rather, it is the caption that causes a double-take in many viewers today, because these dresses were in fact designed by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. The images evoke sartorial aesthetics that are quite contrary to what many of us think of when we hear the name Comme des Garçons: deconstructed, distressed, ‘anti-fashion’, the ‘street urchin and rag-picker looks’.1 Yet, before the well-documented ‘Japanese Fashion Revolution’ in Paris that started in

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1981, Kawakubo’s designs were frequently associated with such terms as cute, girlish and romantic: Comme des Garçons means ‘like boys’ in French. But the clothes that designer Rei Kawakubo makes are not so much about boyishness. Rather, they are dominated by clothes that are marked by traces of girlish sentimentality, clothes that girls certainly love to wear. To compensate for that, their colours are predominantly simple, deep sombre colours as exemplified by black, which effectively bring out their designs.2 Arguably, echoes of this aesthetic are still visible in some of her more contemporary designs, like her ballerina-themed collection in 2005, or the full white dresses with big ribbons of her 2012 collection. Is cute more important to Kawakubo than we previously imagined? In this chapter I examine Kawakubo’s use of ballet-inspired designs and her earlier, ‘pre-revolution era’ designs. I argue that, rather than dismissing these romantic, apparently ‘conventional’ designs of Kawakubo as trivial or unimportant early-career experiments, the girlish, cute and romantic sartorial aesthetics in Comme des Garçons reinforce the subversive aspects of her design, particularly in relation to fashion and gender. These aesthetics, and their references, whether explicit or implicit, conscious or otherwise, to such icons as ballerinas, novice nuns of the Roman Catholic Church and old-world schoolgirls effectively represent Kawakubo’s unique approach to fashion and femininity. By examining the cultural symbolism of classical ballet as well as the Japanese aesthetic concepts of shōjo (girls) and kawaii (cute), this essay raises the possibility that an apparently passive femininity can indeed be highly powerful. Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons have, I would argue, persuasively shown this through their designs, creating dresses for strong, independent women who can retain qualities of romantic, girlish femininity and who do not need to expose their bodies in order to be beautiful. The period of Comme des Garçons from its beginning until its involvement in the ‘Japanese Fashion Revolution’ in the early 1980s has rarely been touched on in discussions of the label. Perhaps contrary to its image as a highly controversial, almost aggressively provocative designer, earlier items of Kawakubo were marketed more as girlishly romantic and cute in Japan. For one thing, kawaii and shōjo were two terms that would often be used to describe Kawakubo’s pre-international designs. For instance, in 1971, an an, a mainstream young women’s lifestyle magazine first launched in 1970, introduced Comme des Garçons as ‘a prêt-à-porter label that makes very kawaii clothes. Its clothes have a touch of boyishness, and yet they are clearly feminine’.3 Comme des Garçons’ items, as an an described them, included a sweater just like the one hand-knitted by mother, and a skirt that had patterns

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of fairytale motifs. Up until the mid-1970s, Kawakubo’s designs were based mainly on two iconographies: a Romantic, folkloric peasant look, like a white cotton dress – the ones that would be admired by ‘romantic girls’ – and simple, monotone garments that evoked the religious habits of Roman Catholic nuns or schoolgirls’ uniforms of the old world.4 These romantic images of Comme des Garçons continued throughout the 1970s, as the young women’s fashion magazine More, launched in 1977, also described the label’s items as ‘not being too chic and always having an air of romantic dreams despite their use of dark colors’.5 On the evergreen topic of dress, gender and identity, Valerie Steele argues that sartorial gender differences are culturally defined, not biologically determined, and thus they vary according ‘to changing physical ideals, which are themselves connected to wider social and cultural ideals’.6 When looking at Kawakubo’s designs through the concept of gender, one might immediately think about their departure from and subversion of the Euro–American standards of conventional feminine beauty and fashion design. ‘Widely regarded as one of fashion’s least “sexy” designers’,7 Kawakubo’s ‘designs are still often perceived or remembered as loose, layered, black, garments with holes that are reminiscent of a bedraggled shroud’.8 Her designs are understood as imposing a challenge against ‘the body-shaping tradition of western female fashion … interpreted as a direct attack on western ideals of female beauty’.9 While maintaining that she did not destroy the tradition of European beauty and dress, but ‘only added new interpretations and possibilities to it’,10 Kawakubo’s stated design philosophy seems to primarily support this view as well. ‘According to Kawakubo’, writes Deyan Sudjic in Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, ‘fashion design is not about revealing or accentuating the shape of a woman’s body; rather, its purpose is to allow a person “to be what they are”. ’11 Indeed, Kawakubo herself has said that: ‘My clothes are for women to wear today … One who is independent … One who is not swayed by what her husband thinks. One who can stand by herself’.12 Therefore, as Steele states: Kawakubo not only challenges the social construction of woman as the beautiful sex, she also interrogates the entire idea of fashion. No longer is fashion a false surface that seeks to create the impression of a naturally beautiful female doll. Instead, it exemplifies a new kind of embodiment. In her apparent pursuit of an alternative ideal of beauty, she denaturalises all our assumptions. The volume of dress may be compressed or stretched or otherwise distorted, as mutable forms imply impossible bodies.13 As a result of her ‘ability to transcend long-held notions of “elegant fashion”’, writes Melissa Marra-Alvarez, Kawakubo’s ‘design strategies cast a new

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definition of beauty, one based on strength and independence’.14 Such an image continues even after ‘she has experimented in both colours and shapes’.15 It is true that from the 1990s in particular Comme des Garçons displayed a significant change: from the stoicism of monotone colours to the exploration of colourful palettes, from a loose, over-sized silhouette to decorativeness. This can also be viewed as a change from the apparent rejection of filigreed delicacy to the celebration of hyperbolic decorativeness. Her 2005 Spring/ Summer Ready-to-Wear collection, ‘Bikers Ballet’ as International Fashion Director of Condé Nast Japan Gene Krell calls it, is one such example that departs from the conventional image that has formed our view of Kawakubo’s designs. (See Figure 8.1.) In the Paris collection of that season, accompanied by the music of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Ravel’s Boléro, performed with a modern touch of electric guitar, models paraded down the runway wearing sculptural black leather biker jackets with massive stitches. These jackets were paired with voluminous skirts that resembled traditional romantic or more perky pancake tutus, or the harem-pantaloons of the Ballets Russes’ Scheherazade

FIGURE 8.1   Ballerina Motorbike in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 May 2017.

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fame (1910), many of which were made out of tulle, lace or sheer materials, cascading in frills. Many of the models wore flat, ballet slipper-inspired shoes and a variation of the rococo powdered wig. Indeed, Kawakubo used balletinspirations not only with her skirts but also with the flat, ballet-like slippers of her shoe designs. According to Colleen Hill in her study of ballet shoes: She [Kawakubo] adopted and emphasised a practical element of true ballet slippers  –  the strips of elastic that are sewn over the instep to hold the shoe comfortably on the foot – using unnecessarily wide, black elastic and wrapping it over the exterior of the shoe. Thinner strips of black elastic were tied into bows and positioned at the vamp. When contrasted against the pearlescent, pink patent leather Kawakubo chose for some of the slippers, the elements of stark black were especially striking. Furthermore, the designer chose to use the squared-off toe of pointe shoes, rather than the soft, rounded toe of the traditional flat.16 For Kawakubo, it is not only bikers who are iconic of traditional masculinity and nonconformism, but also classical ballet dancers, who symbolize power, strength and independence. ‘I thought about the power of the motorbike – the machine itself – and the strength of a ballet dancer’s arms’, Kawakubo has said. In other words, this collection was ‘another chapter … in her careerlong philosophical investigation into women and strength’.17 It thus continued ‘Kawakubo’s longstanding exploration of clothing that expresses women’s strength and independence.’18 The use of classical ballet for such purposes is not particularly new. Both a ballet-inspired mini-crini silhouette and Rocking Horse Ballerina shoes were first introduced in Vivienne Westwood’s The Mini-Crini Collection (Spring /Summer 1985). This bringing back of a ballerina’s tutu and pointe shoes in her collection was explained by Westwood in the following terms: ‘Women want to be strong but in a feminine way. These dresses give you balletic posture and are very, very elegant. You feel like a ballerina … It gives you presence and swings in the most sexy way.’19 (See Figure 8.2.) What is striking is that Westwood is focused on the sensually aggressive qualities of ballet  alone, whereas Kawakubo combines ballet with the biker to create kawaii, or cute, overtones. Westwood perceives the image of the ballerina as a paragon of mature female sexuality and power. Above all, the tutu symbolized sexual availability as well as femininity and dynamic artistry when it was first introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Kawakubo’s ‘Bikers Ballet’, on the other hand, by scaling and juxtaposing elements, emphasizes what appear to be girlish (literally shōjo in Japanese) and cute (kawaii) aspects. Arguably, this view corresponds more closely with both the cultural symbolism and the stylistic history of romantic/classical ballet costumes.

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FIGURE 8.2   Vivienne Westwood. Mini-Crini, 1985.

The ballerina’s tutu and ribbon ballet slippers have profoundly feminine, more precisely girlish, connotations in our modern culture. Many of the heroines in classical ballet repertoires, from La Sylphide (1832) and Swan Lake (1877) through to The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and Cinderella (1945), are innocent maidens, fairies and princesses. These beings, whose ethereal, delicate existences are technically conveyed through the lightness of gauzy ballet dresses, perish when their maidenly virtues come under threat (for example, Sylphide, Giselle). Thus, the feminine figures whom the romantic ballerina embodies on the stage are, arguably, dwelling in a dreamy, imaginative space of liminality between childhood and womanhood, namely a shōjo (girl)-scape.

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It is perhaps apposite to note that this was not always the case, with the origin of the style both highly controversial and political. The neoclassical style of dress was most influenced by the chemise à la reine. The origin of this tubelike dress might be traced to the robe à la créole, a simple muslin chemise dress, which was brought to France from the West Indies during the 1770s. It was made famous by the French Queen, who was seen wearing it in the mid1770s and also wore it in the controversial portrait by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun of 1783.20 The chemise à la reine was also believed to be a juvenile dress, therefore re-inscribing the connection to girlhood.21 The simplicity of the dress in the painting caused a scandal, as it was widely believed the queen had been painted in her undergarments.22 The comfort and simplicity of the style was ultimately appealing, however, and it went on to become popular throughout Europe. (See Figure 8.3.)

FIGURE 8.3   Elisabeth Loise Vigée Le Brun. Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress, 1783.

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The aesthetic symbolism of the ballet tutu as connoting ethereal femininity is strong. ‘The gauzy, white skirt has often transformed a lowborn dancer from a mere mortal into a transcendent creature of seemingly impossible grace and beauty’ in the late nineteenth century and, ‘although it has changed dramatically in order to meet the increasing technical demands of the art form, it has retained its airy and ethereal qualities.’23 Moreover, ‘by the early twentieth century, as more middle-class girls studied and performed ballet, it became increasingly associated with “girl culture” and with idealised [girlish] femininity’.24 The ballet tutu was also a marriage of functionality and aesthetics. The introduction of its lightness allowed women dancers to engage in more acrobatic, dynamic movements, while accentuating motion. Indeed, contrary to the image of female ballet dancers as light, ethereal beings, ‘the emphasis placed on the technical prowess and virtuosity of the ballerina counteracts the stereotyped images of gender. Female dancers know from experience that the “feminine” grace that ballet connotes goes together with a feeling of strength and stretch in the muscles.’25 This undoubtedly fits Kawakubo’s perception of ballet dancers in her collection that ‘alluded to the physical strength and endurance of ballerinas, implicitly questioning conventional images of the delicate and the strong’.26 Ballet’s association with girl culture is sometimes, however, perceived as endorsing antiquated (coded passive) ideals of femininity. Mariko Turk, for example, points out that classical ballet is often tangled up with consumeroriented ‘princess culture’, and thus can theorize it as obscuring ‘recognition of the varied ways that ballet as an art form, rather than as a mode of dress, informs girls’ culture’ and therefore superficiality.27 Jennifer M. Miskec similarly argues that ‘ballet is the perfect space for ideal femininity: thin bodies, frilly skirts, speechlessness; graceful movements making it all look easy while hiding the pain and physical anguish for beauty’.28 ‘Princess culture’ and its ‘emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior’.29 Therefore, Miskec argues that an analogy between female ballet dancers and children can be established: ‘Both are liminal, magical, eroticised, and on display … [occupying] similar cultural spaces, blank but to be projected upon: highly stylised, seemingly natural but unnatural, artificial, eroticised because both are on display.’30 In such a political view, ‘ballerina’ might be placed on the one side of the two extreme poles of femininity, the other being Kawakubo’s independent, strong women who can stand by themselves. If the cultural image of ballerina is symbolic of antiquated ideals of femininity, do her collections like ‘Bikers Ballet’ then contradict what Kawakubo says about her view of fashion and femininity? According to Kawakubo: ‘We must break away from conventional forms of dress for the new woman of today. We need a new strong image, not

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a revisit to the past.’31 Arguably, the highly girlish images of tulle ballerina skirts and pink pointe shoes that she created via her ‘Bikers Ballet’ collection could have been subversive, considering the milieu in which they were created. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sexualization of young women through fashion is a notable phenomenon in, but not exclusive to, Anglophone culture. When assertiveness is associated with youthful femininity, it is often manifested through sexualization. This is particularly the case in American female celebrity culture with what music journalist Stuart Burman calls ‘Barbie doll’ musicians, such as Beyoncé, Britney Spears and perhaps more recently Katy Perry and Rihanna.32 Although it might be their intention to make others accept and adopt their sexual autonomy, the impact these female celebrities are allegedly having on young women and adolescent girls has been noted, especially in relation to a style called ‘porno-chic’. According to Hanna B. Harvey and Karen Robinson: The very term ‘porn chic’ [sic] makes public the usually unspoken yet understood correlation between women, bodies, fashion and sex. Women are commonly described as dressing sexy or sharp, or like whores or prudes, terms which carry both the baggage of moral judgement and the assumption of sexual insight through visual appraisal.33 One can argue that, especially for young women, the current mainstream fashion trend of revealing clothes, predominantly associated with the ‘pornochic’ style, operates as a reaction against the traditional ‘restrictions’ and representations of ‘passive’ femininity. The passive mode of femininity is, needless to say, believed to be epitomized by more ‘normatively/ emphatically’ feminine/girly women. While seemingly subversive from one perspective, highly revealing fashion for women is still problematic. This is because the schizophrenic demands of the ‘virgin–whore dichotomy’ tend to define women’s clothing styles at either extreme of the decency continuum (highly revealing/sexualized or too covered/modest). As a result, the cultural construction of women’s fashion tends to be subject to public debates and institutional regulations (for example, at work and school). This highlights the established multiple binaries of sexualization/modesty through which women tend to be represented, particularly in, but not exclusive to, Euro–American cultures. ‘Porno-chic’ style is therefore subject to a certain criticism, which is a modern echo of Simone de Beauvoir’s highly influential The Second Sex (1949), in which she argued that, in contrast to man, woman: is even required by society to make herself an erotic object. The purpose of the fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as prey to male desires.34

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Here, fashion journalists’ earlier criticism of Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons as imposing a direct attack on Euro–American ideas of female beauty immediately comes to mind. This is because her designs negated the blatant sexuality of closely fitted Western clothes and were, as Patricia Mears says, removed ‘from stereotypes of sexually charged dress by originally producing garments that were almost exclusively unfitted or oversized’.35 As a matter of course, the sexualization of young women does not need to be read as wholly negative, as the look of transparent sexuality is, for instance, often equated with maturity and autonomy. Feona Attwood, for example, suggests that, seen through a positive lens, ‘porno-chic’ aesthetics offer a combination of ‘elements which [signify] feminine pride and confidence with pornographic elements connoting the disorderly, pleasure-seeking female body in a positive and empowering way’.36 I believe the gloominess connected to such styles as ‘porno-chic’ and sexualized femininity is because they tend to be ‘mandatory’ in contemporary Euro–American culture. This in turn diminishes the most significant aspect of the view that perceives them as a form of female empowerment: that they are about choice. Against this almost ‘mandatory’ sexual emphasis of women’s fashion, Kawakubo’s design, as evident in her ‘Bikers Ballet’ collection, and hence her girlish, cute aesthetics, can be significant. As Elisabeth Paillié explains, ‘Kawakubo showed a woman who does not show her body … And that was another idea of beauty. “Beauty” was something other than large breasts or a curvaceous body.’37 Clothes can be understood ‘as the boundary between body, self and society’, and they can be used to show acceptance of, conformity to and the refusal of social expectations of gender.38 In this sense, certain kinds of a kawaii or girlish look, like those in Kawakubo’s ballet-inspired collection, can exemplify a ‘delicate revolt’ that gently and implicitly subverts preconceptions of sexuality and gender. This seemingly fits Kawakubo’s repeated interrogation of ‘the body-clothes unit and fashion’s relationship to women’s lives’.39 What is more, the concepts of shōjo and kawaii were, as already mentioned, strongly embedded in Kawakubo’s design, particularly in the 1970s before Comme des Garçons’ well-reported international readyto-wear shows in 1981. Perhaps not coincidently, Jean Paul Gaultier has described Kawakubo as follows: I believe that Kawakubo is a woman with extreme courage. She is a person with exceptional strength. Moreover, she has a poetic spirit. When I see her creations, I feel the spirit of a young girl. A young girl who still has innocence and is a bit romantic.40 So, how can these terms be understood to be important in fashion and gender, especially in relation to Kawakubo’s designs?

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In Japanese culture, shōjo and kawaii aesthetics are sometimes closely related, or even used synonymously. While shōjo literally means ‘girl or maiden’, it frequently points to a culturally crafted concept, laden with values and history. In a conceptual sense, shōjo points to cultural aesthetics, which are associated with a liminal timescape between pre-adolescent girlhood and mature womanhood where the ‘girl’ can indulge in a momentary reverie unconstrained from social constraints believed to be attached to ‘womanhood’.41 Delicate and ‘impractical’ sartorial items visually translate this timescape. Possibly influenced by a hyper-feminine ideal in the early 1900s, a fashion aesthetic of excessive lace, frills and ribbons, together with the light, fluttering movements such garments make, along with delicate flowers, signal the lightness, delicacy and the transient freedom that might be ascribed to a state of nascent femininity.42 Such an idea of shōjo assigns a degree of independence to the category of adolescent girls and hence separates them from both older and younger women. Despite its emphasis on girlishness, or perhaps because of it, the shōjo look can be, even if gently and subtly, subversive of preconceptions regarding sexuality and gender. This is because such girlish styles that are characterized by decorative sartorial items like frills and floaty skirts can signal ‘girlish’ femininity while actually hiding a woman’s body and thereby allowing ‘simultaneous denial of womanhood and emphasis of femininity’ – a certain sense of asexuality.43 Performing shōjo through fashion can thus be ‘one active and dynamic way that Japanese women can control their sexuality’.44 This idea is also highly applicable to Kawakubo’s ‘Bikers Ballet’ collection, a point to which I shall return. The view that theoretically links girlish sartorial aesthetics and a sense of ‘asexuality’ is highly innovative, given that fashion for young women and adolescent girls in particular tends to be understood via the diametric opposites of forced sexualization and passive modesty. This limited view of gender and fashion leads to the greater difficulty of locating a place inbetween this ‘decency continuum’ in Euro–American culture.45 Contributing to this is a tendency in Euro–American societies to equate girlish femininity with negation, as an unfavourable, unstable and even pathological stage of life that requires adult intervention and regulation. As we have seen, this is represented in the negative view of ballet that links it to passivity, sexualization and (infantilized) femininity. Importantly, the concept of shōjo is not only an idealized construction imposed predominantly by older men and patriarchal institutions, but, as noted previously, also a means embraced and possibly manipulated by (young) women themselves. Here we might notice some similarities between shōjo and the concept of kawaii. The concept of kawaii, however, has a conceptual duplicity. The modern popularity of kawaii aesthetics was in part due to the emergence in the 1970s

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of the kawaii handwriting style among schoolgirls. Written in a European horizontal orientation, with rounded, childlike characters and embellished with small pictures that would later inform emoji, it was the antithesis of the conventional and traditional, regarded as subversive, and banned in many Japanese schools. It is interesting to note the synchronicity of this development with Kawakubo’s early designs. Numerous scholars of Japanese culture have investigated the significance of the kawaii aesthetic. Sharon Kinsella and Brian J. McVeigh have pointed out that kawaii can be a ‘delicate revolt’ that softly challenges conventional ideas of maturity, while a seemingly unthreatening, vulnerable look can prevent it from inciting criticism.46 Kawaii in fashion, which tends to be characterized by frilly, colourful garments with cute animal or confectionery motifs, might seem the opposite of the sharp, edgy and dark designs that we often associate with Kawakubo’s clothes. Laura Miller contends that there is a difference between ‘cute’ as a cultural aesthetic circulating in Japanese girl culture and ‘cute’ as an aesthetic appropriated or manufactured by companies such as Sanrio, which is well known for the production of Hello Kitty. Within Japanese girl culture, ‘cuteness often gets modified, parodied or deliberately inflated in diverse ways’,47 thus implying the autonomous controls of girls. Moreover, the adoption of the emphatically girlish kawaii look can be, as previously mentioned, one way that Japanese women control their sexuality, to emphasize girlishness without being steeped in obvious sexual overtones. Kawakubo’s ‘Bikers Ballet’ collection, particularly its oversized leather jackets with silhouettes of Victorian womenswear, and loose, cute children’s wear coupled with pancake-shaped ‘swan’ tutu skirts of cascading tulles and ballet flats creates a decidedly childlike, kawaii look. The frilly, gauzy pink skirts in this and other collections, like the Spring/Summer 2012 collection White Drama with its white lacy crinolines, certainly emphasize the concept of ‘girlishness’ at the same time as they take much of the viewer’s attention away from the body form of the wearer. The leather jackets, with their classical yet loose and smock-like silhouettes, emphasize childlike cuteness rather than the hard, tough masculinity conventionally associated with bikers, while their ‘hand-sewn Frankenstein stitches’48 point to the concept of gurokawaii or grotesque cute. The unique and playful amalgam of the girlish beauty of the ballet skirt with a hard, masculinist biker jacket, moreover, alludes to the autonomous kind of cute that young Japanese women display, as Miller contends. What is striking is that the concepts of shōjo and kawaii have a history in Kawakubo’s design, as these are important when talking about the earlier years of Comme des Garçons. (See Figure 8.4.) Comme des Garçons has produced clothes that evoke childlike, girlish (shōjo) qualities. Their round-shaped collars, knee-length skirts, big ribbons,

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FIGURE 8.4   Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons. White Drama collection, Spring/Summer 2012, Paris Fashion Week, 1 October 2011. socks and flat-heeled shoes resemble a girl with a shade of innocence. Moreover, a generally roundish shape often evokes a kawaii quality. This ‘shōjo-ness’ also represents the sexual immaturity of Comme des Garçons. One of the shared characteristics between shōjo and kawaii is immaturity. As we have seen, kawaii is often described as vulnerable and childlike, which also evokes a quality that is yet to mature. In terms of Comme des Garçons, an air of sexual immaturity can be one characteristic of the immaturity that links the label to the aesthetic of kawaii. Indeed, as already mentioned, Comme des Garçons’ association with kawaii and shōjo-ness dates as far back as the 1970s and, arguably, is a fundamental aspect of its design.49

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It needs to be noted that the mid-1970s saw the vogue of a romantic folklore style among young women in Japan. A ‘Japanized’ hippy style, this fashion embraced a simple, dreamy aesthetic resembling the worlds of Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880). This style was characterized, for example, by a simple tiered cotton dress and a puff-sleeve dress with floral patterns, exactly like Kawakubo’s ‘peasant look’ dresses that I referred to at the beginning of this chapter. Other examples of Comme des Garçons designs in this period include a ladylike white shortsleeved lace dress with frills that accentuate the waistline, the hem of the skirt reaching to the ankle (1973), and a pinafore dress of white and indigo stripes, with frills that adorn the hem of the skirt, as well as two bands of white lace on the skirt adding ‘cuteness’ to the dress (1973). The latter is styled à la Mary Poppins with a trunk, umbrella and a pair of black boots.50 In addition, Kawakubo also designed a very girlish, accordion-pleated Royal Stewart tartan skirt that cascades down to the ankle, a black cotton dress of slightly undercalf length with round, white organdy collars with intricate embroideries resembling Amish girls (1973) and a schoolgirl-like monotone check blouse with white round collars and slightly flared grey skirt (1973). an an was the main advocate of this romantic folkloric style. Therefore, how Comme des Garçons was represented in an an and other fashion titles back then might have been influenced by the magazine editors’ intentions rather than Kawakubo’s design philosophy. Yet, Kawakubo herself has allegedly said in an interview that ‘I want to make romantic clothes. They don’t have to be lacy dresses for young girls. There should be romantic clothes that mature women can wear.’51 The concept of the ‘romantic’, which more or less links to shōjo aesthetics, was therefore properly embedded in Kawakubo’s earlier design philosophy. As we have seen, the air of sexual immaturity that invoked kawaii and shōjo qualities is well articulated in Kawakubo’s earlier designs, and the stylistic concepts that referred to the religious habit of nuns’ or schoolgirls’ uniforms seem significant. Schoolgirls’ uniforms, for example, might be construed as symbolic of ‘girlhood’. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that girls’ school uniforms are dissimilar to the clothes they wear in their adulthood. This is particularly the case in Japan, where the classic twentieth-century uniform for girls is derived from that of a European sailor. This is different from men’s dress, which still retains many aspects of their schoolboy uniforms. Girls’ school uniforms, therefore, carry a connotation of a certain period in a woman’s life, from early childhood up until the ages of seventeen and eighteen.52 For girls, their school uniforms both indicate their difference from and similarity to boys’, signalling the particular position that they are in: that they are socially not fully mature as women yet. The religious habit of nuns or novices, similarly, connotes a quality that resembles shōjo-ness: ‘The habit symbolised an enduring state of humility;

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the cincture, a sign of chastity and temperance; the tunic, a sign of gravity and modesty; and the white veil, a sign of innocence.’53 The association between the religious habit and girls’ fashion is, for example, illustrated by Madoka Yamazaki in her idea of ‘maidenly’ goth fashion.54 She notes Jacques Rivette’s 1966 film adaptation of Denis Diderot’s The Nun (La Religieuse), in which Danish–French actress Anna Karina wears a loose-fitted light grey habit with a big, round, white collar, as a style icon for a goth-inspired maiden (otome) style. Strikingly, the silhouette of the religious habit that Karina wears in the film bears a strong resemblance to Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2012 collection White Drama, particularly the white satin dress with trumpet sleeves and a big ribbon at the front that accentuates the full skirt that is hooped with cocoonlike ivory underskirts. The resemblance of Kawakubo’s contemporary designs to schoolgirls’ uniforms is also noted, especially with such lines as Tricot Comme des Garçons (a casual line for young consumers) and Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons.55 We need only see a just-below-knee-length black dress with a round, sailor collar, which is paired with socks and flat shoes, in Comme des Garçons’ Autumn/Winter 2015–16 collection to grasp the design’s perpetual reference to schoolgirls’ uniforms. Tricot Comme des Garçons’ frilly knee-length skirts and loose-fitted tops or gingham pinafore dress worn over a round-collared blouse (for example, the Spring/Summer 2014 and Spring/ Summer 2015 collections, designed by Tao Kurihara) also strongly evoke kawaii and shōjo aesthetics. (See Plate 10 in colour insert.) Actually, Kawakubo herself explains a line of her label Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons (originally known as Robe de Chambre) in the following terms: This line is the core of Comme des Garçons, that is its basic taste, the scent of Comme des Garçons itself. In other words, the styles that I have always loved. When I launched the brand 30 years ago, I always created clothes that were characterized by pleated skirts and rounded collars, like Robe of today.56 Working not only through a radical reinterpretation of the established ideals of high fashion and feminine beauty, Kawakubo also uses concepts that are often unjustly perceived as submissive or trivial, such as the girlish, cute, romantic and innocent, in order to create and showcase fashion designs that are both dazzling and provocative. Like the romantic ballerinas in her ‘Bikers Ballet’ collection, these allude to the concepts of kawaii and shōjo, and these two qualities can be found throughout the designs of Kawakubo and her colleagues. Her earlier designs, prior to her debut in the international fashion world, might not be as radical, creative or dramatic as her later creations and have so far not received as much attention. However, I would contend that

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these less recognized works point to an integral part of her design aesthetic, and their importance should not be missed. Rather than simply linking sexiness to female empowerment, Kawakubo’s designs offer us an alternative way of understanding the conceptual triad of fashion, beauty and femininity. Comme des Garçons shows how looking girl-like and appreciating a romantic, cute fashion aesthetic can indeed be both subversive and beautiful.

Acknowledgement I am very grateful to David E. Jellings for his careful reading and editing of this chapter.

Notes 1 Harold Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, Dress 11(1), 1985, p. 7. 2 an an, 5 December 1973, p. 17. All English translations of Japanese texts are done by the author unless otherwise stated. 3 an an, 5 August 1971, cited in Masato Kudo, ‘Comme des Garçons izen no komu de gyaruson: 1970 nendai gakanouni shita Comme des Garçons [Comme des Garçons before Comme des Garçons: Comme des Garçons that the 1970s made possible]’, in Mariko Nishitani (ed.), Relativity Comme des Garçons: Why Do We Talk about Comme des Garçons?, Filmart, Tokyo, 2012, p. 341. 4 Takuya Kikuta, ‘Sōshoku no haijo kara kajō na sōshoku e: “kawaii” kara yomito kukomu de gyaruson [From the Rejection of Elaboration to the Emphasis on Decorativeness: Comme des Garçons as analysed from kawaii]’, in Mariko Nishitani (ed.), Relativity Comme des Garçons: Why Do We Talk about Comme des Garçons?, Filmart, Tokyo, 2012, pp. 142–44. 5 Anjo Hisako, ‘Fukusūko no hyouzou to shiteno komu de gyaruson [Comme des Garçons as More than One Representation]’, Journal of Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences 8, 2005, p. 2. 6 Valerie Steele, ‘Clothing and Sexuality’, in Claudia Kidwell and Valerie Steele (eds), Men and Women Dressing the Part, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1989, pp. 17–19. 7 Valerie Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Japan Fashion Now, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2010, p. 81. 8 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, n. 1, p. 7. 9 Deyan Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 80. 10 Kawakubo cited in Kikuta, ‘From the Rejection of Elaboration’, n. 4, p. 173.

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11 Sudjic, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, n. 9, p. 81. 12 Kawakubo cited in Melissa Marra-Alvarez, ‘When the West Wore East: Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and the Rise of the Japanese Avant-Garde in Fashion’, Dresstudy 57, 2010, p. 22. 13 Valerie Steele, Gothic: Dark Glamour, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008, p. 69. 14 Marra-Alvarez, ‘When the West Wore East: Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and The Rise of the Japanese Avant-Garde in Fashion’, n. 12, p. 24. 15 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, n. 1, p. 7. 16 Colleen Hill, ‘Ballet Shoes: Function, Fashion and Fetish’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Dance and Fashion, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2014, pp. 155–56. 17 Sarah Mower, ‘Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear Comme des Garçons’, Vogue, 5 October 2004 (http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2005-readyto-wear/comme-des-garcons) accessed 10 March 2022. 18 Valerie Steele, ‘Letter from the Editor’, Fashion Theory 9(3), 2005, p. 261. 19 Westwood cited in Claire Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2004, p. 20. 20 Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1995, p. 71. 21 Peter McNeil, ‘The Appearance of Enlightenment: Refashioning the Elites’, in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman (eds), The Enlightenment World, Routledge, New York, 2004, p. 395. 22 Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2015, p. 186. 23 Patricia Mears, ‘From Sylph to Swan: The Tutu and Fashion’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Dance and Fashion, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 139. 24 Valerie Steele, ‘Dance and Fashion’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Dance and Fashion, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 21. 25 Anna Aalten, ‘“The Moment When It All Comes Together”: Embodied Experiences in Ballet’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(3), 2004, p. 272. 26 Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 7, p. 81. 27 Mariko Turk, ‘Girlhood, Ballet, and the Cult of the Tutu’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39(4), 2014, p. 484. 28 Jennifer Miskec, ‘Pedi-Files: Reading the Foot in Contemporary Illustrated Children’s Literature’, Children’s Literature 42(1), 2014, p. 240. 29 Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, HarperCollins, New York, 2011, p. 6. 30 Miskec, ‘Pedi-Files’, n. 28, pp. 241–42. 31 Patricia Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution: Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Japan Fashion Now, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2010, pp. 183–85. 32 Burman cited in Marcia Martin et al., Get It On (documentary), Chuma Television, Canada, 2004.

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33 Hannah Harvey and Karen Robinson, ‘Hot Bodies on Campus: The Performance of Porn Chic’, in Ann Hall and Mardia Bishop (eds), Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture, Praeger, Westport, CT, 2007, p. 69. 34 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975 [1949], p. 543. 35 Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution’, n. 31, p. 161. 36 Feona Attwood, ‘Pornography and Objectification’, Feminist Media Studies 4(1), 2004, p. 14. 37 Paillié cited in Sanae Shimizu & NHK, Unlimited Comme des Garçons, Heibon-sha, Tokyo, 2005, p. 5. 38 Vera Mackie, ‘Transnational Bricolage: Gothic Lolita and the Political Economy of Fashion’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20, April 2009 (http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/mackie.htm) accessed 10 March 2022. 39 Mears, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 7, p. 81. 40 Shimizu & NHK, Unlimited Comme des Garçons, n. 37, p. 5. 41 See on this, Helen Kilpatrick, ‘Envisioning the Shōjo Aesthetic in Miyazawa Kenji’s “The Twin Stars” and“Night of the Milky Way Railway”’, Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9(3), 2012, p. 3. 42 Tomoko Aoyama, ‘Transgendering Shōjo Shōsetsu: Girls’ Inter-text/sex-uality’, in Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta (eds), Genders, Transgenders, and Sexualities in Japan, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 49. 43 James Welker, ‘From The Cherry Orchard to Sakura no sono: Translation and the Transfiguration of Gender and Sexuality in Shōjo Manga’, in Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (eds), Girl Reading Girl in Japan, Routledge, New York, 2009, p. 168. 44 Karen Nakamura and Hisako Matsuo, ‘Female Masculinity and Fantasy Spaces: Transcending Genders in the Takarazuka and Japanese Popular Culture’, in James Roberson and Nobue Suzuki (eds), Men and Masculinities in Modern Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 69. 45 Linda Duits and Liesbet van Zoonen, ‘Headscarves and Porn-Chic: Disciplining Girls’ Bodies in European Multicultural Society’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(2), 2006, p. 111. 46 Sharon Kinsella, ’What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?’, Fashion Theory 6(2), 1995, pp. 215–37; and Brian McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan, Berg, Oxford, 2000, esp. p. 143. 47 Laura Miller, ‘Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan’, International Journal of Japanese Sociology 1, 2011, p. 24. 48 Mears, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, n. 7, p. 81. 49 Kikuta, ‘Sōshoku no haijo kara kajōnasōshoku e’, n. 4, p. 186. 50 an an, 20 May 1973, p. 204.

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51 Kawakubo in More, July 1977, cited in Hisako, ‘Fukusūko no hyouzou to shitenokomu de gyaruson’, n. 5, p. 3. 52 Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression, Berg, Oxford, 2005, p. 66. 53 Susan Michelman, ‘Breaking Habits: Fashion and Identity of Women Religious’, Fashion Theory 2(2), 1998, p.175. 54 Madoka Yamazaki, Ōdorī to furansowāzu: otomekaruchānyūmon [Audrey and Françoise: An introduction to maiden culture], Shōbun-sha, Tokyo, 2002, p. 35. 55 Kikuta, ‘Sōshoku no haijo kara kajō na sōshoku e’, n. 4, p. 184; Kudo, ‘Comme des Garçons izen no komu de gyaruson’, n. 3, p. 367. 56 Vogue Japan, August 2014, cited in Kikuta, ‘Sōshoku no haijo kara kajō na sōshoku e’, n. 4, p. 185.

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9 Breaking the idea of clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s fashion manifesto Karen de Perthuis

Rei Kawakubo is a famously, intensely private person. An anomaly in highend fashion’s celebrity designer-focused, brand-driven world, she stopped taking the customary post-collection bow on the catwalk years ago. She rarely gives interviews, expecting instead anyone who wants to understand her work to look at the clothing itself. So in October 2013, when the highprofile website The Business of Fashion published a ‘creative manifesto’ written by the founder of Comme des Garçons, it made an impression. Kawakubo didn’t say any of the things that designers usually say about the creative process. Art, fashion history, films and travel had as little to do with the creation of her Spring/Summer 2014 collection as ‘seeing new shops, looking at silly magazines [or] taking an interest in the activities of people in the street’.1 Because these things already existed they could not help her find something new. What she wants, what she has to wait for, is ‘the chance for something completely new to be born within myself.’ In order for this to happen, wrote Kawakubo, ‘I tried to think and feel and see as if I wasn’t making clothes.’ Making clothes is what Kawakubo does. She started her label Comme des Garçons in 1969 and heads a company that manufactures numerous clothing lines for men and women, as well as lines by her protégées, Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara, Kei Ninomiya and Fumito Ganryu. There are Comme

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des Garçons flagship stores, boutiques and franchises across the world, and the experimental department store curated and opened by Kawakubo in London in 2004, Dover Street Market (DSM), has expanded to operations in Tokyo and New York with a franchise in Beijing. In 2004, she launched the first of the ephemeral Comme des Garçons ‘guerrilla stores’, which involved the occupation of low-cost, unrenovated retail spaces that would close after a year and were tactically located in edgy corners of offbeat cities. But making – and selling  –  clothes is not all that she does. From 1988 to 1991, Kawakubo published Six, a biannual A3-sized magazine that coincided with the launch of Comme des Garçons’ collections and set a new agenda for fashion branding. Now collector items, each issue of Six incorporated collaborations with artists and photographers in a format where text was minimized and the visual reigned. Indeed, artistic collaborations punctuate Kawakubo’s career and, coopted by the artworld from early on, her clothes are regularly exhibited in museums and art institutions. Born out of Kawakubo trying to think and feel and see as if she wasn’t making clothes, the Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2014 collection consisted of precisely the sort of clothes that the artworld likes most when it is engaging with fashion. (See Figures 9.1 and 9.2.) As far as reporters at Vogue were concerned, this was ‘something nearer a parade of experimental art pieces than a fashion show’;2 she had pushed ‘the idea of wearable fashion to the absolute limit’, and the objects she sent down the catwalk were ‘over-the-top creations, not clothes’.3 This is not an uncommon response to Kawakubo’s work. Writing about the designer in 2005, Judith Thurman suggests she gave up representational fashion in the early 1980s and has been making ‘clothing as wearable abstraction’ ever since.4 In the same article, Kawakubo expresses gratitude that the author has not asked about her ‘creative process’; she couldn’t explain it, and even if she could why would she want to? The Spring/Summer 2014 collection was particularly challenging and represented a new degree of abstraction in the designer’s repertoire, with even seasoned professionals finding it ‘one about which it’s incredibly difficult to write’.5 In hindsight, it would be considered the first in a quartet of collections that were beyond translation. The release of the manifesto then was a gift, a bonus for those attempting to decipher Kawakubo’s creative process, and yet how much it served this end is unclear. As I will explain later, I am not even sure that the term ‘manifesto’ can legitimately be used to refer to these few paragraphs. This notwithstanding, I consider these words, this manifesto (the word sticks), to be one of Kawakubo’s ‘works’, one of her creations, and so in this chapter I propose to pull at its threads and unpick its seams to unravel the text of what she has written. I begin with its ‘making’, weave in and out of the knotted history of the fashion manifesto and then

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FIGURE 9.1   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Not Making Clothing collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013. come back to the clothes themselves. In doing so, I confess that I am putting myself into a role not unlike that of the customer who enters a Comme des Garçons store, unsure of whether the object in front of her is a hat or a coat, who struggles to find a sleeve and needs the help of staff when trying on a dress to determine which way is up. If I am not always certain of the material before me, that seems appropriate. I don’t promise to decipher this difficult collection. I’m not sure that Kawakubo’s manifesto says anything about her creative process that she hasn’t said before; but it does invite thinking about manifestos, about clothes, about fashion and about creating something completely new.

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FIGURE 9.2   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Not Making Clothing collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013.

*** Kawakubo’s manifesto came to The Business of Fashion readers as an exclusive courtesy of System magazine, a recent entrant to upmarket, arty fashion publishing. The manifesto itself was the culmination of a longformat conversation between the designer and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Kawakubo’s husband (and CEO of Comme des Garçons International), Adrian Joffe, acting as translator. Obrist, or HUO as he is known, is himself quite a celebrity in the art world. A curator and prolific publisher,

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he travels constantly, knows everyone and is a notoriously hyperactive, insomniac workaholic. An enthusiastic talker, with more than 2,400 hours of interviews on tape, the contrast with Kawakubo is stark. The designer, it seems, hands out words like pearls; pattern cutters in her studio work from her enigmatic fragments of speech; fashion journalists try and fathom her practice through cryptic clues she offers backstage; and even her husband treats her with awe. As Thurman notes, ‘Small talk – indeed any talk – is not Kawakubo’s forte.’6 The interview, at least initially, does not go well. Like an excited undergrad writing for a university newspaper, Obrist’s first question comes out in a tumble of words and intellectual name-dropping  –  Heidegger and Rem Koolhaus are mentioned – only to be met with a curt translated response: ‘Rei thinks there is no relation.’7 As the interview – and the prompts – progress, Kawakubo reveals that she began working as a designer because she couldn’t find the clothes she wanted  –  and the work allowed her to be independent. There was no epiphany that she can think of, but ‘a sense of values’ was important.8 She has collaborated  –  on the media project Six, with photographers, with artists, with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and with Vivienne Westwood  –  but as for the designers in her stable, Watanabe, Kurihara, Ninomiya and Ganryu, ‘they’re staff, so I wouldn’t call it a collaboration’.9 She likes punk, doesn’t need dreams, and doesn’t draw or write down rules; these, she states, ‘are in her head’.10 Much of what she says in the interview isn’t new, but an echo of previous public statements, although at one point a surprised Joffe tells Obrist, ‘She’s never said that to me before.’11 At the close of the interview, Obrist asks her to write something in handwriting. She resists; it’s his thing because he thinks handwriting is disappearing; it’s nothing to do with her. Persisting, Obrist suggests she could just write ‘Comme des Garçons’. Kawakubo holds her ground. Joffe’s last translated words are: ‘She expects that none of this was very useful to you.’12 The manifesto arrives a few days later, emailed to Obrist as something of a peace offering, a compromise or an afterword, or perhaps a combination of all three. *** Once described as ‘a genre in a hurry’13 – possibly in deference to F.T. Marinetti’s celebration of speed, transformation and novelty in his landmark Manifesto of Futurism (1909) – the term ‘manifesto’ has a particular historical and political resonance. As signalled earlier, the document I have been calling Kawakubo’s manifesto is not described as such in System. Only once it is published on The Business of Fashion website is it branded as ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’. Not all of it was new, with some lines having already appeared

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in reviews of the collection in the form of quasi-quotes from the designer. Was this then a case of overreach? Can an emailed statement legitimately be called a manifesto? I think so. Certainly, it has enough of the hallmarks. It is a short, striking gesture that blends creative posturing and artistic vision. If there is also an air of the press release about it, purity of genre has never been a concern of the manifesto, which as Julian Hanna points out has ‘long borrowed from advertising’.14 Kawakubo is also clearly aware of the historical and political connotations of the form, as evidenced by her guerrilla stores, which were run according to a series of strict manifesto-styled guidelines that, when launched, drew comparisons in the press with Marinetti’s famous text. The manifesto, in general, is itself having something of a fashion moment. Those produced by individual brands mostly read like the product of a PR agency, but more traditional manifestos have been produced by the slow fashion, ethical and sustainable fashion movements. Following such examples, the three-point ‘Detox Fashion Manifesto’ launched by Greenpeace in 2011 speaks for ‘a global movement of fashionistas, activists, designers and bloggers united by a belief that beautiful fashion shouldn’t cause toxic pollution’.15 Another to attract attention is British designer Vivienne Westwood’s whimsical, meandering manifesto, which, she claims, ‘penetrates to the root of the human predicament and offers the underlying solution’.16 One of Westwood’s slogans is ‘Shop Less Think More’, and when it comes to the question of her own role in the fashion system and excessive consumption she requests that, if people want to buy her clothes, they ‘don’t buy too much’.17 A more sophisticated response to over-consumption and sustainability in the twenty-first century is provided by trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort’s ‘AntiFashion Manifesto’, in which she explains why fashion is obsolete, newness no longer interesting, and addresses the repercussions of current fashion practice across institutions, manufacture, industry and media.18 Kawakubo’s 2013 manifesto has different concerns. Far from being anti-fashion, it heads in the direction of pure fashion, a point to which I return later. More immediately, it reaches inward, searching for the point of creation. Shifting the line of vision from the present to the past, the fashion manifesto of the early twentieth century belongs to Marinetti and the artists of the Futurist avant-garde, who produced a number of proclamations on clothing between 1914 and 1933. In 1920, the ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’ was published by Volt, the pseudonym of the artist Vincenzo Fani. Most of the other related writings were concerned with men’s dress. These included ‘Futurist Men’s Clothing: A Manifesto’ and ‘The Antineutral Suit: Futurist Manifesto’, both issued by Giacomo Balla in 1914. (See Figure 9.3.) Writing at a time when mass production and the ideology of modern consumerism were in their infancy, the Futurists envisioned fashion in a very different light from current thinking. Far from seeing it as a problem, the potential of the

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FIGURE 9.3   Giacomo Balla, Antineutral/Futurist Suit, 1918. built-in obsolescence of fashion enthralled them, writes Emily Braun, because ‘it necessitated continued creativity on the part of the artist, provided sensual delights and novelty for the wearer–consumer, and served as a stimulus to the national economy’.19 There is much in Kawakubo’s manifesto and work that makes me want to compare her practice with the writings of Marinetti, Balla and Volt. But if I am going to gather these Futurist artists and poets around Kawakubo, I need first to untangle the ideological and aesthetic differences that might hold them apart. Despite being considered ‘the birth scene of aesthetic modernity’,20 Futurism was the only right-wing movement of the modernist avant-garde, with an ideology controversially tainted by misogyny, nationalist bellicosity and unrepentant fascism. In part, notes Braun, the misogyny of early Futurist writings was tempered by support for the feminist movement after the war (female emancipation would undermine the status quo of social life and traditional institutions such as marriage and the family that the Futurists held in disdain). But this support was short-lived and, at any rate, shot through with inconsistencies. Chauvinistic aggression is woven through the fabric of Volt’s proposed designs, with the female body that would wear them idealized as a

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‘machine-gun woman’, a daring symbol of the ‘sapper-soldiers at the avant-garde of an army of lightning’.21 Kawakubo has never identified with any movement and is quiet about her political beliefs. She has, however, suggested letting her clothes speak for her. Following this advice does not necessarily make things much clearer, but what does come through, apart from a determined individualism that makes me hesitate to call her a feminist, is a paradoxical feminizing of military tropes and motifs and a persistent unravelling of gender in all its forms. Others, with sound reason, have categorized her work as postmodernist deconstruction.22 In broad terms, the Futurist modern ‘antihumanity’ was to be dressed in simplicity and comfort, with freedom of movement, the removal of frivolous detail, the banishment of class distinction in dress and the integration of new technologies. Kawakubo’s clothes, especially during the period when Japanese design was sending shock waves through the fashion establishment in the early 1980s, shared these modernist principles; but, grounded in Japanese culture, aesthetics and history, this was more by accident than by design and, at any rate, to draw any direct relation would be to ignore the sheer radicality of what she proposed. Futurist design happened primarily on the surface; transformation in Kawakubo’s work is profoundly structural. Then there is the question of colour. Kawakubo, it has been said, ‘invented black’, the widespread use of which in their own time the Futurists despised. Reading Balla’s attack on the melancholic, funereal dress of his contemporaries is not unlike reading the derisory reviews Kawakubo received in the conservative press when she first showed in Paris. And when Volt describes women’s clothing as ‘gray spider webs’ of ‘mediocrity and wretchedness’,23 his tone is echoed six decades later by the critic in Le Figaro who dismissed Kawakubo’s ‘patched up clothes’ as ‘miserablism’, ‘brand new rags … tied up hastily in tatters’.24 Unlike most, though, the Futurists took fashion seriously. A performanceorientated movement, they valued the inherently performative quality of fashion and, as Braun notes, ‘were prescient in understanding clothing design as a legitimate politics of the body’.25 The artistic ingenuity of women’s fashion, in particular, with its ‘speed, novelty [and] courage of creation’, inspired Volt to proclaim it as ‘the female equivalent of Futurism’.26 Determined to rid the world of what Balla denounced as the ‘mediocrity of moderation [and] so-called good taste’27 in fashion, the Futurists saw an opportunity to resist the bourgeois, the anodyne, the conventional and the routine. What they envisioned, Kawakubo has done. Marinetti claimed that fashion was an art, as much as architecture and music, and advocated women’s fashion houses be directed by great poets and painters. Left to design their own apparel, he wrote, women could adorn themselves as ‘an original living poem’,28 a delightful, double-edged sword of a description that adapts with ease to the spirit of the Comme des Garçons-clad woman (or man).

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For the Futurists and Kawakubo alike, creativity, invention and the propagation of the new lie at the heart of their aesthetic philosophy. In her creative search for the unknown, writes Kawakubo, she ‘only can wait for the chance for something completely new to be born within myself’. Probably the shortest manifesto ever written is Ezra Pound’s three-word dictum: ‘Make it new.’ This implicit rejection of the past runs through the rhetoric of both the Futurists’ proclamations and Kawakubo’s public statements. Starting each time ‘from zero’,29 fashion history holds nothing of value for the designer, she writes, because it refers to objects that already exist. Volt likewise mocks the tendency to ‘revive the classics [and] silly dreams of exhuming the past’30 and, in his manifesto, champions the dynamism that is at the heart of fashion’s perpetual compulsion towards change, novelty and transformation. How could the past hold any value when fashion was its own revolution, always at the ready to leap ‘over the vertiginous jaws of the Absurd’?31 The Futurists had limited occasion to transform their sartorial philosophy into actual garments. None were professionals in the clothing industry and relied on local tailors or, in the case of Balla, family members to make garments up. No designs were ever mass-produced. The archive then is scant. Balla and Fortunato Depero designed costumes for the Ballet Russes; Balla made studies for, among other things, a women’s bathing costume; there are a few ‘antineutral’ suits, a waistcoat here and there, and some dresses, scarves, blouses and hats. By contrast, Kawakubo has decades of collections, all photographed and documented, often by the most skilled and avant-garde image creators of our era. If a time-travelling Marinetti, Balla or Volt were to dip into this vast archive, he would find much to applaud. One half of the Futurists’ arsenal against bourgeois conformity and staid sartorial conventions was asymmetry – a principle that Kawakubo took to the extreme in her warped and wrapped clothing design from the start. The other half was the daring use of brilliant colour (exemplified in Balla’s ‘hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes’32); and, although Kawakubo was for years closely aligned with anti-colour, once her ‘regime of black’ had become cliché, she turned to bold, dynamic colour with what could be described as Futuristic abandon. In the details – of what the Futurists proposed and Kawakubo designed in her signature Comme des Garçons Ready-to-Wear collections  –  more similarities emerge. In one of Kawakubo’s most discussed collections, Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body, Spring/Summer 1997 (also known as ‘Body-Bump’),33 Balla’s concept of ‘transformable’ apparel and the ‘ingenious counter dispositions of lines’ he called for in The Antineutral Suit are transposed into a reorganization of the body, the symmetry of desirable curves mocked, literally pushed aside and distorted by tumorous lumps and bumps. Take away the aggressive intent of Volt’s imagined ‘gowns that trigger surprises and transformations’34 and his rather vague

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FIGURE 9.4   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Top, skirt and shoes, Tomorrow’s Black collection, Spring/Summer 2009. conception anticipates Kawakubo’s statement ‘I put parts of patterns where they don’t usually go.’35 The notion comes to life in the Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2014 collection, as well as in many others. In Cacophony from Spring/Summer 2008, Brobdingnagian pockets sprung out from beneath their coats; in Spring/Summer 2009’s Tomorrow’s Black, dresses, skirts and jackets were made entirely of shoulder segments (see Figure 9.4); for Spring/Summer 2011, garments came with ‘spares’ – one dress would have two more hanging from the shoulders and jackets had extra sleeves. And in the Hybrid-themed Autumn/Winter 2011–12 collection, components were collaged and reversed in a ‘half-and-half idea’36 that offered a different proposition when seen from the front or the

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back. The models on the catwalk of Cacophony had faces painted Pierrot white with rosebud cheeks and yellow eyes; those for Tomorrow’s Black wore atomic clouds of peppermint hair. Wearing the new styles of clothing, wrote Volt, would require women of daring and courage, characteristics not inessential to the wearer of Kawakubo’s experiments in design. The same holds true for the trailblazing women of fashion history. As the student of dress from the Renaissance through to the Belle Epoque will attest, Volt’s proclamation, ‘Women’s fashion can never be extravagant enough’,37 is a vision that belongs as much to the past as to the future he imagined and that Kawakubo has realized. *** A manifesto is a set of rules and Kawakubo likes rules. In the interview with Obrist, rules are a recurring theme. The ground rule is kachikan, which translates as ‘a sense of values’. This goes hand-in-hand with a rule from the manifesto: ‘Nothing new can come from a situation that involves being free or that doesn’t involve suffering.’ There were rules for the Comme des Garçons guerilla concept stores, including the rule that each store close after one year. Once the concept was widely copied by others, she abandoned it altogether; the idea was no longer new and, well, ‘The rules are the rules.’38 While in conversation with Obrist, she makes up a new rule about another of her retail concepts, the DSM ‘deconstructed’ department stores: Paris can’t have one – it’s too bourgeois. When it comes to designing her collections, it is by reacting against rules that Kawakubo gets to something new. The rule for the ‘Body-Bump’ collection was ‘she couldn’t do new clothes, so she did new bodies’, a rule that was later turned on its head when it came to creating the Autumn/Winter 2012–13 ‘Flat Collection’; here the rule was to ‘ignore the human body’.39 Joining this cluster of rules is Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2014 collection where breaking the idea of clothes began with the designer trying not to make clothes at all. (See Plate 7 in colour insert.) In System magazine, the twenty-three looks of this collection are described as ‘sculptural objets’, nothing like the ‘mere clothes’ that the rest of ‘the fashion industry spews out every season’.40 So what do these ‘not clothes’ look like? The image – of the twenty-three looks from the catwalk and System’s accompanying editorial  –  is my source. First, the catwalk. The dominant colours are black, white and violent fuschia, interspersed with touches of cobalt, lavender and yellow. Taffeta and ruffles make a regular appearance and so does the skeletal memory of the crinoline and the farthingale (proving, coincidentally, that working in a void of fashion history is more difficult than the designer’s rhetoric suggests). Nothing is where it should be or what it

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should be. The ‘crinoline’ is over the dress; a single layer of fabric emits a 3-D sheen; skirts are padded and quilted into worm-farms of tumours; there are complicated origami folds; and flatpack pleated dresses look more like the cardboard used to create the pleats than the finished garment itself. It’s hard to make sense of it all. It’s as if the contents of an industrial fabric warehouse were blown into the Comme des Garçons workroom via pneumatic tube and a talented alien was tasked with putting it all together. Typically, magazine editorials dilute the catwalk vision. In the System sequence of photographs the catwalk models’ unhealthy pallor and offkilter black lipstick are wiped clean and the elaborate hair sculptures are replaced by a simple messy schoolgirl chignon. But the complexity of the clothes remains. On its cover, System depicts the model wearing a lego’-mutton gown in aubergine taffeta under a Kevlar crinoline body frame. On the pages inside, she wears a tunic with asymmetrical panels of boxpleats made from what looks like tailor’s fusing; there is a dress that nods to Balenciaga but has the proportions of a car seat; and a slashed black silk, oversized Halloween-pumpkin dress is worn with vermillion Mr Squiggle booties. Struggling to describe these objects, I find myself referencing existing fashion, former styles, other designers; unfortunately, all the selfreferential tropes of fashion that Kawakubo hopes to escape by not looking at ‘silly magazines’ or fashion history are impossible to avoid. I want to resist taking the path of fashion journalists and the tendency to explain away these garments as conceptual art, not ‘fashion’; but I can’t do much better than recalling the point made by Thomas Carlyle that in all of history’s ‘Modes and habilitory endeavours, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking’.41 That’s the problem with creating something new; everyday vocabulary pulls up short when even a simple word like ‘sleeve’ loses its meaning, when the thing it refers to isn’t where it should be and doesn’t look like any sleeve you might have seen before. At the same time, I’m beginning to understand that perhaps this is how you break the idea of clothes – in increments, one pattern piece at a time. When Kawakubo writes that she ‘breaks the idea of “clothes”’, she places the word ‘clothes’ in quotation marks, thus putting into doubt what we take for granted. Getting dressed, being clothed is an everyday practice that is, writes John Harvey, ‘helpful to us in the daily business of life’.42 But what he calls ‘the normal work of clothes’43 is far from simple. As an outer shell, a soft husk, as ‘armour’, clothes provide a physical and symbolic barrier between our selves and the world. Linked to gendered, cultural and social identities, they connect us to others, but can also separate and protect us from their gaze. They adorn, they attract, they repel, they seduce. They can be beautiful or ugly, invoking admiration, ridicule, respect, vitriol, mistrust and suspicion. They give comfort and cause pain. As ‘an ornament of the soul’, they expose

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and disguise. They can work metaphorically, transferring their own qualities of style, fabric and texture to our characters, our actions and our thoughts.They can lie and be treacherous, turning against us when we least expect it. They can go completely unnoticed – or matter very much. In breaking the idea of clothes, Kawakubo does not so much ignore the normal work of clothes as add to what clothes do, to what they can be. She changes what clothes signify, confounding register and mode. This was famously the case with the series of collections that began with ‘Destroy’ in 1982, in which the designer literally broke down cloth and clothing. Fragile silks were tortured, crumpled and baked; threads were left dangling on terminally unfinished garments; woollen jumpers were shotgunned with holes and called ‘lace’. (See Plate 11 in colour insert for a later example.) Commentators searching to understand this new sartorial language referred first to European fashion history and the Renaissance practice of ‘slashing’, before settling on the theory of deconstruction by way of explanation. Taken in the context of Japanese culture, however, writes Akiko Fukai, what Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto (with whom she is invariably paired in discussions of this period) introduced to a Western audience were the principles of the Japanese terms wabi  –  without decoration or visible luxury – and sabi – old and atmospheric.44 The curator Harold Koda described this concept as the ‘aesthetics of poverty’;45 and, on the one hand, it was praised by observers such as Polly Mellon as ‘showing the way to a whole new way of beauty’,46 with fans like the film-maker (and one-time Comme des Garçons model) John Waters embracing it as ‘disaster at the drycleaners’.47 On the other hand, for those critics discomfited by the appearance of garments that rejected every rule of Western dressmaking and aesthetics, the collection was ‘threadbare and unwearable’. In time, the aesthetic became diluted, familiar and mainstream – rebranded as ‘grunge’, it was entirely ‘wearable’ and no longer shocking. The rules of conventional fashion had been broken, writes Fukai, and out of this clothing itself had been redefined.48 *** The role of fashion in Kawakubo’s work cannot be emphasized enough. Even those who claim that ‘Rei Kawakubo doesn’t really do fashion’49 accept that these ‘objets’ are, surprisingly, commercially successful as clothes, and her designs are widely copied and destined to influence ‘swaths of mass fashion’.50 Extreme asymmetry, unfinished garments, unorthodox padding, lattice work, toughfrilliness, cut-outs, sliced-and-diced tailoring and the sartorial underpinnings of centuries past are all favourite tropes and motifs of Kawakubo’s that have re-emerged in the work of other designers and in the mainstream. It is also

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true that Kawakubo herself revisits and refines her archive. Amazingly, almost without fail, what she produces is shockingly new. If fashion, as Harvey writes, ‘exaggerates to make its point’, then Kawakubo exaggerates the normal work of fashion. Everything that defines fashion – change, transformation, artifice, excess, novelty and the new – is pushed to the limit in her clothing design. In the three Comme des Garçons Ready-to-Wear collections that followed Spring/Summer 2014, she continued to break new ground and present images of a dressed body such as have not been seen before. The Autumn/Winter 2014–15 collection, themed MONSTER, included gargantuan suit jackets, crop tops with sleeves knotted to sleeves that left cuffs trailing along the catwalk, and bundles of woollen jackets that were tangled together, gripping at the body for dear life. (See Plate 4 in colour insert.) Whole figures were draped and obscured. The Blood and Roses collection of Spring/Summer 2015 was entirely in red, with the models enveloped in tumbling vines of roses, trapped in violent blood-splattered canvases or dressed in garments that glistened like bodies turned inside-out. (See Plate 8 in colour insert.) The eighteen looks of Autumn/Winter 2015–16 were restricted to a strict palette of gold, black and white. Brocade, lace and tulle dominated, decorated with touches of fur, satin and PVC. There were massive bows, unexpected cut-outs, a spherical sandwich-board dress, bodies all bundled and tied and the familiar refrain of tumorous padding that distorted the frames of models whose faces were obscured behind severe ‘lace’ veils of hair. The difficulty of understanding these uncompromising collections, the attempt to decipher what Kawakubo might be saying about the world, about bodies, about gender, about clothes, about fashion, is a recurring theme in writing by fashion journalists. In reviews, recourse to explaining it away as art is common. In pushing ‘the boundaries of what “fashion” is and whether that word even has to translate into wearable clothing’, Kawakubo’s work ‘is similar to any other modern art form designed to stir the mind and delight the eye’, writes Suzy Menkes.51 In other reviews, the ‘gorgeous and inexplicable visions’52 on the catwalk are variously described as ‘artistic’,53 ‘fashion as conceptual art’54 and ‘confrontational art’.55 Such reviews written by experts in the field whose presence at the shows, with all the atmospherics provided by music, light and audience, and with access (or proximity) to Kawakubo backstage, provide valuable, immediate and often thoughtful reports of collections that can only be viewed by the rest of us via the printed image or online. Categorizing fashion as art – especially cutting-edge fashion out of Japan – is not a recent development; more than three decades have passed since Artforum magazine featured on its cover a rattan bodice by Issey Miyake, permanently (it now seems) blurring the boundaries between art and fashion. And of course fashion can be an artform, as well as an industry defined by brands and trends. But the categorization remains problematic.

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Over the years, Kawakubo has steadfastly resisted the label of ‘artist’, proclaiming instead that she is a ‘businesswoman’ or, on occasion, an ‘artist/ businesswoman’.56 Against this stands her insistence on a creative process where she ‘starts from zero every time’,57 working out of a void in a manner that (at least in the Western tradition) we associate with the artist–genius– creator. Neither proposition is without its flaws, but whatever it is that Kawakubo does, there is no need to remove it from the realm of fashion or of clothes. Rather, the inability, the resistance, the hesitancy to speak of Kawakubo’s clothes qua clothes and the tendency to displace the term ‘fashion’ with ‘art’ overlooks what it is that fashion is capable of doing – and being. What Kawakubo demonstrates repeatedly is that – beyond the human body and human imagination  –  sartorial fashion is a phenomenon with few limits. Her work is challenging because it deals with new realities, ones that don’t already exist. Again and again she proves that fashion can be abstract, conceptual, confrontational, hyper-imaginative and artistic while still remaining within the realm of the body, and still being wearable and commercially viable as clothes. She does this by setting herself the quest of finding something completely new. More than fashion as art, this is fashion intensified. The Comme des Garçons Autumn/Winter 2015–16 collection was themed Ceremony of Separation. (See Plate 10 in colour insert.) To those present it felt like a culmination or a requiem and was written about in mournful, elegiac terms. Might the suffering that Kawakubo wrote about in the manifesto as being essential to creating something new finally have taken its toll? Might not this collection be her last? The palette of white, black and gold, wrote Jo-Ann Furniss, ‘took on the ritualised connotations of grief: white as the Eastern expression of loss, black as the Western, and gold the most ornately ceremonial with its role in the burial rituals and death masks … found in ancient tombs … of the Egyptian pharaohs’; in these clothes, Kawakubo was addressing ‘the finality of death’.58 As has often been observed, death and fashion are never far apart. Predicated on constant change and the repudiation of the immediate past, fashion’s creations are fleeting and ephemeral, ‘meant to live for a few perfect moments and then be replaced by the next’.59 But fashion’s is a strange kind of death, one without finality, one that heralds endless rebirth and renewal. When on the catwalk and in the shops trends are rehashed and the past endlessly exhumed, when on the street and in our daily lives the ‘new’ is rarely new, it is easy to think of fashion in its debased form of novelty. And yet, this erasure of the past is also a reaching towards the creation of new realities. It is this that fashion insiders witness in the presence of a Comme des Garçons show. Starting out with ‘the intention of not even trying to make clothes’, the designer waits for something completely new to be born, and out of this waiting, out of this suffering, Rei Kawakubo creates pure fashion.

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Appendix Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto Going around museums and galleries, seeing films, talking to people, seeing new shops, looking at silly magazines, taking an interest in the activities of people in the street, looking at art, travelling: all these things are not useful, all these things do not help me, do not give me any direct stimulation to help my search for something new. And neither does fashion history. The reason for that is that all these things above already exist. I only can wait for the chance for something completely new to be born within myself. The way I go about looking for this from within is to start with a provisional ‘theme’. I make an abstract image in my head. I think paradoxically (oppositely) about patterns I have used before. I put parts of patterns where they don’t usually go. I break the idea of ‘clothes’. I think about using for everything what one would normally use for one thing. Give myself limitations. I pursue a situation where I am not free. I think about a world of only the tiniest narrowest possibilities. I close myself. I think that everything about the way of making clothes hitherto is no good. This is the rule I always give myself: that nothing new can come from a situation that involves being free or that doesn’t involve suffering. In order to make this SS14 collection, I wanted to change the usual route within my head. I tried to look at everything I look at in a different way. I thought a way to do this was to start out with the intention of not even trying to make clothes. I tried to think and feel and see as if I wasn’t making clothes. — Rei Kawakubo, October 2013

Notes 1 Hans Ulbrich Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, System, Autumn/ Winter 2013, p. 38. Republished as ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’, The Business of Fashion, 31 October 2013 (http://www.businessoffashion. com/articles/bof-exclusive/rei-kawakubo-comme-des-garcons) accessed 24 April 2018. All further quotations are referenced as ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’. 2 Sarah Mower, ‘Commes des Garçons Spring 2014’, Vogue, 28 September 2013 (http://www.vogue.com/fashion-week-review/862001/comme-desgarcons-spring-2014/) accessed 19 January 2018. 3 Jessica Bumpus, ‘Spring/Summer 2014 Ready-to-Wear Comme des Garçons’, Vogue, 28 September 2013 (http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/

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spring-summer-2014/ready-to-wear/comme-des-garcons) accessed 10 August 2018. Also on the Vogue website, a more nuanced take was offered by Jo-Ann Furniss, who wrote, ‘To pass judgments on “wearability” or “practicality” just seems facile, especially as figures such as Leigh Bowery have existed in the past and helped move the goal posts of the perception of clothing and fashion’ (http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2014ready-to-wear/comme-des-garcons) accessed 24 April 2018. 4 Judith Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, The New Yorker, 4 July 2005 (http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/04/the-misfit-3) accessed 11 October 2018. 5 Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Spring 2014’, n. 2. 6 Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, n. 4. 7 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 39. 8 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 40. 9 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 44. 10 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 42. 11 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 41. 12 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 45. 13 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (http://manifesto.humanities. ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/#1) accessed 5 November 2018. 14 Julian Hanna, ‘Manifestos: A Manifesto’, The Atlantic, 24 June 2014 (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/manifestosa-manifesto-the-10-things-all-manifestos-need/372135/) accessed 10 September 2018. 15 Greenpeace, ‘Detox Fashion Manifesto’ (https://act.greenpeace.org/eaaction/action?ea.client.id=1844&ea.campaign.id=34920&ea.tracking.id=gpi) 11 October 2021. 16 Vivienne Westwood, ‘Active Resistance to Propaganda’ (http:// activeresistance.co.uk/getalife/Manifesto_ENGLISH.pdf) accessed 11 October 2018. 17 Carole Cadwalladr, Guardian, 2 December 2007 (http://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/2007/dec/02/fashion.women) accessed 5 November 2018. 18 Lidewij Edelkoort, Anti-Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade, March 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV3djdXfimI) accessed 24 April 2018. 19 Emily Braun, ‘Futurist Fashion: Three Manifestoes’, Art Journal 54(1), Spring 1995, pp. 34–5. 20 Lawrence Rainey, ‘Introduction: F.T. Marinetti and the Development of Futurism’, in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 2. 21 Volt, ‘The Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, cited in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 253.

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22 See, for example, Bonnie English, ‘Fashion as Art: Postmodernist Japanese Fashion’, in Louise Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 2005. 23 Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21, pp. 253–54. 24 Janie Samet, ‘Les Japonais jouent “Les Misérables”’, cited in Akiko Fukai, ‘Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion’, in Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Centre, London, 2010, p. 25. 25 Braun, ‘Futurist Fashion; Three Manifestoes’, n. 19, p. 38. 26 Volt, ‘The Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21, p. 253. 27 Giacomo Balla, ‘The Antineutral Suit: Futurist Manifesto’, in Rainey, Poggi and Wittman, Futurism: An Anthology, n. 21, p. 202. 28 Braun, ‘Futurist Fashion: Three Manifestoes’, n. 19, p. 38. 29 Susannah Frankel, Visionaires: Interviews with Fashion Designers, V&A Publishing, London, 2001, p. 160. 30 Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21, p. 253. 31 Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21, p. 253. 32 Giacomo Balla, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing’ (1913 unpublished), in Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru and Benedikt Hjartarson (eds), The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, de Gruyter, Berlin, 2013. 33 The titles applied to Comme des Garçons collections are derived from the ‘typically cryptic backstage directive’ provided by Kawakubo to journalists and so can be inconsistently applied in reportage and commentary of the designer’s shows. 34 Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21, p. 253. 35 ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’, n. 1. 36 Tim Blanks, ‘Fall 2011 Ready-to-Wear Comme des Garçons’ (http://www. vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2011-ready-to-wear/comme-des-garcons) accessed 24 April 2018. 37 Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion’, n. 21. 38 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 43. 39 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 42. 40 Obrist, ‘Interview with Rei Kawakubo’, n. 1, p. 39. 41 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1975, p. 25. 42 John Harvey, Clothes, Acumen, Stocksfield, 2008, p. 11. 43 Harvey, Clothes, n. 42, p. 2. 44 Akiko Fukai, ‘Couture Clash’, in Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Centre, London, 2010, p. 15. 45 English, ‘Fashion as Art’, n. 22, p. 29. 46 Akiko Fukai, ‘A New Design Aesthetic’, in Louise Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 2005, p. 20.

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47 John Waters, ‘Rei Kawakubo’, in Role Models, in Beautiful Books, London, 2010, p. 103. 48 Fukai, ‘A New Design Aesthetic’, n. 46, p. 25. 49 Sarah Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Spring 2013 (http://www.vogue.com/ fashion-week-review/862465/comme-des-garcons-spring-2013/) accessed 19 July 2018. 50 Sarah Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2011’ (http://www.vogue.com/ fashion-week-review/863302/comme-des-garcons-fall-2013/) accessed 11 October 2018. 51 Suzy Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’, New York Times Magazine, 6 December 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/t-magazine/reikawakubo-dover-street-market.html#) accessed 5 December 2018. 52 Matthew Scheiner, ‘Comme des Garçons Turns up the Volume’, New York Times, 17 June 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/insidefashion-week/fall-2015/comme-des-gar-ons) accessed 18 April 2018. 53 Suzy Menkes, ‘Comme des Garçons: Roses and Blood’, Vogue (http:// en.vogue.fr/suzy-menkes/suzy-menkes-column/articles/comme-des-garonsroses-and-blood-fwpe2015-suzy-menkes-paris-fashion-week/23320#4bqOQu ojcG5ogzX7.99) accessed 24 August 2018. 54 Lisa Armstrong, ‘The Art Question at Comme des Garçons’, Telegraph, 28 September, 2014 (http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/article/TMG11126324/ Paris-Fashion-Week-The-art-question-at-Commes-des-Garconsspringsummer-2015.html) accessed 10 July 2018. 55 Sarah Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2014’, Vogue, 1 March 2014 (http:// www.vogue.com/fashion-week-review/861783/comme-de-garcons-fall-2014/) accessed 11 October 2018. 56 Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, n. 4. 57 Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, n. 4. 58 Jo-Ann Furniss, ‘Fall 2015 Ready-To-Wear: Comme des Garçons’, Vogue, 8 March 2015 (http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2015-ready-to-wear/ comme-des-garcons) accessed 5 November 2018. 59 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, Kodansha, New York, 1994, p. 165.

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10 The complexity of Kawakubo: A radical form of consciousness Bronwyn Clark-Coolee

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t is widely acknowledged that over the last three decades, Rei Kawakubo’s work has provided another way to think about fashion. In making a response, I want to start with the idea of astonishment, a sense of sustained astonishment, something akin to that described by Roland Barthes when considering photography’s ‘intractable reality’, the ‘that has been’, the photograph’s attestation to ‘that what I see has indeed existed’. ‘Always the Photograph astonishes me’, Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, his celebrated treatise on photography, ‘with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly’.1 ‘What I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution … but a reality in a past state.’ For Barthes, this paradoxical turn of photography, ‘at once the past and the real’, was an effect that never ceased to scandalize him. Barthes’ ambition in Camera Lucida was to articulate the very condition of photography. Propelled by sustained astonishment, and mourning as well the death of his mother with whom he had been close, he commences his analysis with the uneasiness that seizes him when he looks at his own image on a piece of paper. Speaking from the position of the observed subject, he worries at the disjunction between what is recorded and what one knows of one’s ‘self’: ‘What I want … is that my (mobile) image … should always coincide with my (profound) self.’2 More broadly, he also wonders at the disturbance that this representational doubling of what was once mythically linked causes. Recognized as a ‘complex, paradoxical and elusive text’3 and with its voice ‘at once accessible and difficult’ possessing ‘the intimate tone

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of an autobiography’, Camera Lucida is nevertheless ontologically motivated. Driven by the question ‘what was photography “in itself”’,4 one of its defining contributions is its formulation of a proposition that places photography in relation to death: ‘It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more … each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contact with what has ceased to exist, a contact with death.’5 While both compelling and provocative  –  and today some forty years since its initial publication, still an influential text in its field – the link between photography and memory or photography and death, however, is not the subject here. Rather, starting with a somewhat speculative conjunction, the focus of what follows is the work of fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Coincidentally over the same period, through her label Comme des Garçons, Kawakubo has consistently explored and challenged the possibility of what fashion might be. Guided by the singularity of her vision, one of the defining features of her work has been its assertion of freedom through an entrenched resistance to convention and its sometimes unprecedented forms.6 Compelling in its originality yet ‘never simply transparent to meaning’, her work can also be characterized by its recurring challenge to the sufficiency of the surrounding discourse.7 A question that frequently underlies the reception of her work, for example, is how we might read it. Although acclaimed as a significant force within contemporary fashion, Kawakubo’s work has attracted comparatively little critical attention outside of the realm of fashion media. The field of curatorial scholarship is one exception, offering from time to time sustained and insightful analysis. Taking up the surrealist concept of ‘elsewhere’ (ailleurs) as raised by Michael Stone-Richards in his essay for the exhibition ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo (2008), along with the suggestive coincidence of my own response to Barthes’ sense of astonishment, my aim is to open up meaning around her work, to examine its complexity a little more. While direct visual relationships are often foregrounded in approaches to fashion and surrealism and the wider area of fashion and art, the critical ideas of surrealism (and ideas associated with surrealism) have recently begun to be considered as a way to think through fashion’s sometimes more contradictory and ‘irrational’ dimensions, those aspects of fashion that generally remain unaddressed.8 Exploring affinities to surrealism through both a conceptual frame and with reference to the biannual publication Six that was published by Comme des Garçons from 1988 to 1991, Stone-Richards situates Kawakubo’s work as an ‘encounter between self, clothing and world’.9 Crucial to his claim is a link to the concept of ‘elsewhere’, as articulated by the curators of an earlier exhibition (Koda, Martin and Sinderbrand), through what may be taken as an implied reference to Barthes’ rhetorical codes of fashion.10

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While Barthes has written extensively about fashion  –  fashion scholar Michael Carter, for example, describes him as a thinker for whom clothing and fashion were an important area of study11  –  my interest, however, is not only with the register of astonishment and ‘amazement’ that propels his investigation in Camera Lucida but also his pursuit of something that escapes easy definition. ‘From the first step, that of classification’, Barthes writes, ‘photography evades us.’12 As Geoffrey Batchen notes  –  perhaps following Nancy Shawcross’ suggestion that Camera Lucida ‘unfolds like a mystery novel’13  –  ‘its narrative structure … resembles a kind of philosophical detective novel, a quest where the protagonist, Barthes himself, pursues an elusive quarry’.14 Typically it is Barthes’ semiological approach to how clothing is translated into language as addressed in The Fashion System, or what Carter has referred to as ‘the linguistic model laid down by Barthes’, that is associated with fashion studies.15 Rather than the ‘linguistic model’, however, the following is inspired by Barthes’ response to and preoccupation with certain images in Camera Lucida, what Batchen has described as the pursuit of his ontological desire ‘by way of his own personal response to various photographs’.16 This focus on the image is part of a larger redirection in Barthes’ work from the 1970s.17 Sometimes referred to as an autobiographical or subjective turn, it could also be described as a deeper philosophical reorientation, a move away from the ‘scientificity’ of previous work to a position that ‘reaffirms the power and pleasure of both reading and writing’.18 If The Fashion System can be located as exemplifying an earlier phase where the how of meaning – ‘meaning-production’ – was at the heart of his investigations, my gravitation instead is towards Barthes’ late work where the focus is on the development of thought and the elucidation of meaning through ‘the genesis of a space or condition of writing that lets desire emerge and be acknowledged’.19 This chapter is largely a conceptual analysis. In a sense, it could be understood as the intersection of one thing with another. It addresses what is posited as the complexity of Kawakubo’s work through an investigation of the idea of astonishment and the surrealist concept of elsewhere. It explores astonishment in relationship to ‘shock’ (a dominant mode of response established with Kawakubo’s early collections) and, building on existing analysis, as an element of Barthes’ conception of ‘the third form’. Surrealism is both posed as a speculative link (through a conjectural approach) and forwarded through the work of Stone-Richards. The association that StoneRichards makes to ‘elsewhere’ is extended to suggest a surrealism of the everyday – where otherness and the experience of encounter are fundamental forces  –  as a productive context through which Kawakubo’s work might be considered.

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Resistance and embodiment Barthes’ approach in Camera Lucida stands in contrast to The Fashion System, arguably his most well-known text on fashion, published over a decade earlier.20 While it has been suggested that The Fashion System ‘can appear as turgid, heavy, long … even rebarbative’,21 Camera Lucida is frequently described as operating in a meditative space, one that ‘refuses to adhere to any one particular literary genre’.22 As Shawcross observes, ‘Camera Lucida represents an attempt by Barthes to write in a new way, an attempt to be expressive and analytical at the same time’; an approach that Shawcross asserts is intrinsically bound to Barthes’ concept of ‘the third form’.23 Elaborated through a range of previous texts that reach back to such early publications as Writing Zero Degree (1953) and Michelet (1954), ‘the third form’ points to Barthes’ deep interest in the production of writerly texts. It also ‘supposes a mobile, plural reader … who’, as Barthes notes, ‘begins to write with me’.24 Significantly, however, in this context where Kawakubo’s frequent ‘terse epigrammatic’ framing of her work,25 typically marked by a sense of resistance, might well be understood, it can be noted that when introducing Camera Lucida Barthes also acknowledges his ‘desperate resistance to any reductive system’. Responding to ‘the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical, and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses’, Barthes states that, ‘by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me … a desperate resistance to any reductive system’. Moreover, he continues, ‘For each time, having resorted to any such language to whatever degree, each time I felt it hardening and thereby tending to reduction and reprimand, I would gently leave it and seek elsewhere: I began to speak differently.’26 It is now widely recognized, as Barbara Vinken points out, that ‘the second generation of [Japanese] designers [who came to international attention in the early 1980s]  –  Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) and Yohji Yamamoto, known as the Big Three  –  fundamentally revolutionised our – Western – concept of fashion’.27 Highlighting Kawakubo’s deconstructivist approach, one understood as both systematic and radical in nature, Vinken goes so far as to state that, ‘Following the first Comme des Garçons show in Paris, in 1981, fashion was never the same again.’28 Referring to ‘the shock that Kawakubo’s fashion provoked’, Vinken nevertheless makes a finer distinction. Taking issue with the restrictive connotations of her early collections, she differentiates between what she refers to as Kawakubo’s ‘negative aesthetic’ and its established framing as an aesthetic of poverty, emphasizing instead its intent as ‘an examination of our idea of fashion

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itself’.29 Invoking connections to classical representations of the clothed body, she argues that what is at stake in Kawakubo’s work is ‘a new mode of embodiment’.30 While a rethinking of the relationship between clothing and the body is well recognized as characteristic of Kawakubo’s work, it is particularly the ‘reconfiguring’or ‘recoding’, specifically the ‘[entering] into a dialogue with Western fashion practices as part of the realisation of [her] aesthetic’, that Vinken underlines.31 Harold Koda, a long-time observer – ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’ (1985) is an often cited early essay  –  also refers to Kawakubo’s aesthetic values when locating her work. In a later essay for ReFusing Fashion, Koda draws a link to the sense of shock that her work provokes, qualifying it, however, as a consistent surprise and disruption of her public’s expectations. Recognizing both its ‘compelling originality’ and ‘confrontational novelty’, Koda identifies the origins of her creative processes as outside of fashion. Kawakubo’s ‘transgressions’, he suggests, are a result of her challenges to normative standards of both beauty and taste  –  ‘a positing of alternatives to received notions’. ‘In both the precincts of high and low culture’, he observes, ‘Kawakubo establishes a discomforting zone of vacillating aesthetic ambiguity.’32 As one of the so-called ‘Big Three’, Kawakubo’s work is commonly framed in relationship to her cultural identity and its challenge to conventional norms of Western fashion. While both Vinken and Koda refine and extend this positioning – Vinken through elaborating her concept of ‘designing back’33 and Koda, in this instance, through contextualizing an exploration of her ‘expanded visual language’ in relationship to a dialogue between fashion and art  –  a rehearsal of these broader ideas persists in the wider reception of her work. Hans Ulrich Obrist, for example, prefaced a recent interview by stating that, ‘since showing her first collection in Paris in 1981, the industry’s press and buyers have become accustomed to Kawakubo’s regular and radical expression of sheer otherness’.34 Yet, despite this assertion of familiarity and Kawakubo’s sometimes quite direct address of her ideas and values in such interviews, a frequent observation is that ‘her collections are often difficult to understand’.35 Although Kawakubo’s public reticence, for example, is well recorded, her contrary insistence and evasive relation to being questioned  –  what Judith Thurman has observed as a ‘[resistance to] being defined even by her own words’36  –  are often perceived as a reluctance to explain herself, as an effort not to be understood. Not only is the somewhat frustrating process of coming to terms with the ‘otherness’ of her work invariably repeated in popular accounts, but more notably, given a wider dearth of critical material, it is rare to get beyond the circulation of a fairly generalized set of tropes. To borrow a description that has been applied to a type of writing around the work of artist Louise Bourgeois, someone whose practice can also be

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characterized as singular, overviews tend to predominate and ‘all too often peter out into biographism’.37 More tellingly, however, on another level – even though as Koda explains, ‘[Kawakubo’s] artistic practice remains legible and assertive’38  –  such responses also resonate as an indirect reminder of the ‘complex, multiple, and multilayered’ nature of the reception of the Japanese designers of the 1980s, particularly their ‘challenge to established reading and interpretive practices in the world of fashion’.39 While Kawakubo’s work is conventionally posited as both breaking expectations and resisting analysis, Kawakubo for her part consistently elaborates her work in relationship to a set of values, ‘the kachikan of Comme des Garçons’; a set of values that are usually outlined through an address of approach or process. ‘There is always one rule, the kachikan of Comme des Garçons and then there are themes, sub-themes and interlocking plots.’40 The endeavour ‘to make clothes that didn’t exist before’; the insistence always on a return to zero; the favouring of constraints in the creative process as a means to allow the emergence of something new; and the valuing of the accidental synergy of collaboration are concepts that Kawakubo routinely reiterates. Simultaneously foregrounding fashion (always a focus on the new) and disavowing it (‘I break the idea of clothes’41), it is unsurprising that Kawakubo’s ‘[discard of] all prevailing assumptions’ also occasionally gives rise to the notion that the meaning of her work may be located in the detail of her applied processes.42 Yet what I want to suggest is that it is the very space of possibility of her work  –  what Koda refers to as its ‘vacillating aesthetic ambiguity’ or, as he described it in relation to her early collections, her ‘desire to conjure the unprecedented’,43 or what Obrist is suggesting when he refers to its ‘sheer otherness’ – that continues to engage and intrigue both observers and consumers. This sense of her work might also be suggested by gesturing towards its resistance and integrity, along with the combination of its unambiguous, exploratory intent and the resulting moments of seeming incoherence or ambiguity that inevitably arise from such intent. For it is these moments apparent from time to time within her collections where the limits of intelligibility are tested  –  beyond what might be understood as simply breaking with expectations – that somewhat paradoxically, again and again, extend the meaning of her work.44 Indeed, Kawakubo altogether has been quoted in a 1994 interview as saying: ‘I like the way that fashion is seized in a way that is not fashion.’45 In thinking through Kawakubo’s work  –  what can be taken broadly as both its complexity and ambiguity  –  Barthes’ text offers several points of resonance. The radical exploration of form; the tendency to experiment; the determinism and freedom evident in her approach; the marked sense of dissonance with established taste; its sometimes elusive qualities, yet also

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its ‘capacity to impinge on the present’;46 and the underlying drive always to test and explore the limits of fashion chime in small ways with characteristics of Barthes’ work. If, as Shawcross observes, ‘the locus of much that is meaningful or vital in Camera Lucida exists in the trace’, then it could be understood that I use these points of resonance to bring into relief a set of traces in Kawabubo’s work.47 Along with the idea of astonishment and the concept of elsewhere, the question of the definition of fashion and an understanding of fashion as ‘a complex cultural form’ also inform this discussion.48 It is well understood, for example, that it is the nature of fashion to continually define and redefine itself, that change is essential to any definition. As Barthes observes, ‘In theory [fashion] is made up only of what is new.’49 It is also well recognized that fashion has a complex relationship with time. While ‘fashions define themselves in contrast … to what went before … temporality is at the heart of fashion’s unstable  –  yet strangely permanent  –  present, which is linked existentially both to the past, which it incorporates, and to the future, which it anticipates’.50 As Ulrich Lehmann notes, ‘we are always left speculating about its changing future space’.51 In this regard, and taking into account established attributes such as its transience and ability to transform, Elizabeth Wilson has referred to fashion’s ‘tantalising and slippery essence’.52 Wilson’s emphatic assertion about ambiguity is perhaps relevant here as well: while ‘fashion may appear relativistic, a senseless production of style “meanings” … fashion is coherent in its ambiguity’.53 The ambiguity of fashion is a point that Barthes has also explored. While the context for Wilson’s remarks is a broad discussion of fashion’s relationship to modernity, Barthes’ focus is more specific. In his essay ‘The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges’ (1967), he examines what was a popularly construed opposition between the two designers. Asserting a conception of fashion as resting on a violent sensation of time, he pinpoints their differences through their contrasting attitudes to time – as style for Chanel and as fashion for Courrèges  –  and interpretations of the body. He concludes that a way of understanding this ‘contest’, ‘if at least you have no intention of buying either’, is that ‘fashion is not only what women wear, it is also what all women (and all men) look at and read about’.54 In a more far-reaching way, however, he also suggests that, ‘constituted collectively’, understood as a ‘profound spectacle of an ambiguity rather than that of us being spoiled by a pointless choice’, fashion presents ‘something to be interpreted’, the possibility of ‘a truly poetic subject’.55 Extending these ideas: the encounter between self and other evident in the presentation of Kawakubo’s collections, the sense of what could be described as ‘a movement of coming-into-thought’56 – of wanting ‘to make something strong that didn’t exist before’57  –  that is contained in her

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insistent return to zero with each new collection and the dedicated singularity of her vision suggest,58 although somewhat generally, a poetic consciousness at play. Certainly, the biannual publication Six (1988–91) evidences more directly an engagement with a poetic dimension of fashion.59 However, setting these suggestions aside for the moment, my questions are: If it is accepted that Kawakubo’s work has provided another way to think about fashion, how might we begin to understand its complexity a little more? How, in this case, is fashion coherent in its ambiguity?

Astonishment and shock For me, the sensation of astonishment is provoked partly by image and is inextricably linked to fashion at a certain moment, a so-called ‘crossover’ period between fashion and art from the early 1980s through to the mid1990s. I am thinking here of various images, all of which evoke questions around fashion  –  how it is defined and how we understand it.60 Among them, the imprint of a widely reproduced image by Hans Feurer for Comme des Garçons (1983) remains strong, as does a similarly commissioned and circulated series of photographs by Peter Lindbergh (1986). Both photographers capture a particular tone; it is easy, for example, to think of these images as simply emblematic of a certain moment. Executed in black and white and with a concentrated focus on the featured garment, they have a complex presence yet maintain the elegant economy of a document. However, it is the register of the whole garment in combination with a certain rhetoric of gestures that makes these images distinctive. Using a short depth of field and the technique of the decisive moment Feurer, for example, depicts the body in movement effectively showcasing the silhouette of the garment. (For a reproduction of Feurer’s image, see https://www.pinterest. com.au/pin/225602262554551029/.) Looking closely at his image  –  we see the back of the model, almost pivoting on the balls of her feet with her hands raised, with the garment extended dynamically – I can’t help but think that astonishment is registered in a self-reflexive way.61 Michael Stone-Richards uses the term ‘surprise-in-motion’ to encapsulate the relationship between self, clothing and the world that he sees as central to Kawakubo’s work, an idea that he links to the surrealist notion of the chance encounter and articulates as the bringing together of disparate realities to cause surprise. Certainly, the concept for the image appears aligned with that of a fleeting apparition, a Baudelairean moment if you like – ‘at once marvellous, magical and miraculous’.62

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Before turning to the concept of ‘elsewhere’, I want to consider the idea of astonishment, to differentiate it from shock, as it is shock rather than astonishment that is more often than not expressed in relation to Kawakubo’s work. Although closely entwined  –  both words register disturbance and levels of incomprehension – they are forwarded here as distinct rather than interchangeable concepts. As a description of an event, ‘shock’, is embedded in accounts of the reception of Kawakubo’s early collections (1982–3) and continues as a recurring point of reference. The critical response to these collections – what was referred to as their ‘ragged’, ‘post-atomic’ or ‘Hiroshima chic’, for example – is now legendary. While shock may be taken to be fundamental to the experience of fashion, particularly where recourse to an external frame of reference might be unavailable, or understood as a valuable characteristic of fashion at certain times or as a tactic of certain designers, in this instance, however, ‘shock’ can be identified as the register of an event or experience that is not easily assimilable, one that exceeds existing frames of reference. Addressing this period as ‘the genesis of what would become Japan’s shakeup of the fashion world’ and referring to ‘the shock of the garments unveiled by both Kawakubo and Yamamoto’, Akiko Fukai, for example, observes that ‘robbed of a scale or point of reference by which to evaluate the results, audiences seemed disoriented’.63 Dorinne Kondo also refers to the shock of Japanese fashion at this time. Investigating the ‘contestatory potential’ of fashion in relationship to representations of race and gender, she frames it as an ‘aesthetic disruption, leading us to confront our assumptions about what counts as clothing’.64 More specifically, she points towards the ‘radical refiguration of clothing’s articulation of bodies’ as the challenge represented by the work of Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, suggesting that ‘perhaps this refiguration reached its most uncompromised expression in the Comme des Garçons lines of the early eighties’.65 Taking into account the widely acknowledged influence of Kawakubo’s ‘decontructivist’ tendencies on a later generation of designers (such as Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester) and with reference to a delineation of ‘three timescales’ in relation to the rhythms of clothing as discussed by Barthes in ‘Fashion and the Social Sciences’ (1966), the articulation of shock in these instances could be grasped further as the registration of a shift in what Barthes terms the ‘moderate variation’ of clothing. (This is in contrast to the short timescale of ‘micro-fashion’ such as those linked to seasonal changes or variations or the longer timescale of archetypal forms of clothing.66) Particularly with clothing (not fashion) as the focus of these timescales, relevant here as well is Vinken’s assertion almost thirty years after Kawakubo’s Paris debut of the primacy of fashion when advancing the concept of a ‘negative aesthetic’.

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Notably Vinken rejects the emphasis on shock (what she refers to as ‘social shock’) provoked by Kawakubo’s early collections; and in redirecting attention to ‘an examination of our idea of fashion itself’ implicitly displaces the question of what counts as clothing contained in the earlier description of an ‘aesthetic of poverty’.67 It is at this point that we might draw a contrast with the notion of astonishment. The theorist of early cinema Tom Gunning speaks of astonishment as a series of visual shocks, emphasizing the activity not passivity of the audience in doing so. In his article ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (1989), Gunning presents a counterargument to traditional accounts of cinema’s first audiences. Contextualizing early cinema as emerging from ‘the illusionistic arts of the nineteenth century’ such as magic theatre, Gunning contends that rather than the panicked, naïve and terrorized spectator that is conventionally posited, the spectator ‘remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment’.68 With confrontation ruling ‘both the form of the films and their presentation’, he suggests that the aesthetics at play – what he names as both astonishment and attraction – ‘[address] the audience directly’.69 Locating this early phase of cinema as preceding the dominance of narrative cinema, he also frames it as ‘a cinema of instants, rather than developing situations’.70 ‘The spectator does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama’; rather, ‘the viewer’s curiosity is aroused and fulfilled through a marked encounter, a direct stimulus, a succession of shocks’.71 And, in a similar way, to interpret Kawakubo’s work through ‘astonishment’ and not ‘shock’ is to suggest that it is something not just to be looked at but to be interpreted. With the ‘return to zero’ central to Kawakubo’s approach to fashion, a further suggestion, drawing from Gunning’s analysis, is that her collections could be considered as ‘a developing situation’ – what could be construed as a narrative approach to fashion  –  rather than a series of instants. Gunning’s accompanying observation that ‘the cinema of attractions persists in later cinema … [and] provides an underground current flowing beneath narrative logic and diegetic realism, producing those moments of cinematic dépaysement beloved by the surrealists’,72 additionally provokes the speculation that such instants (what could be understood comparatively as the marked sense of encounter within Kawakubo’s collections) have the potential to create moments of disorientation or alienation, moments – following the surrealist definition of dépaysement – when our conventional perceptions are disrupted and we see the world anew. Such moments recur strongly in recent collections such as the Spring/ Summer 2016 (Blue Witch), Autumn/Winter 2015–16 (Ceremony of Separation) and Autumn/Winter 2014–15 (MONSTER) collections  –  and to varying degrees with individual looks in the Spring/Summer 2015, Spring/

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FIGURE 10.1   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Blue Witch collection, Spring/ Summer 2016, Paris Fashion Week, 3 October 2015. Summer 2014 and Spring/Summer 2012 collections. (See Figures 10.1 and 10.2 and Plates 12, 10 and 4 in colour insert.) While these collections could be seen simply as a continuation of Kawakubo’s deconstructivist tendencies, their scope and concentrated focus suggest something far more conjectural and expansive  –  where what is insistently rendered is something other to ourselves. Framed earlier in relationship to resistance (and by implication freedom) and the tension between the combination of an unambiguous, exploratory intent and a seeming incoherence or ambiguity that arises from such intent, the dynamics that underlie Kawakubo’s work could be extended to include the sense of response that might arise from the interaction of attraction and alienation, a type of ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ if you like. The element of transformation so central to conceptions of fashion is located in the moment of encounter rather than more conventionally as a projection of desire. In a somewhat mediated way, an oft-cited promotional image for Comme des Garçons by Cindy Sherman (1994) encapsulates these tensions. The provocation of this image lies in its underlying proposition. An enigmatic, shaman-like figure occupies the picture plane. Proffering a glittering globe that is both the focal point and object of her gaze, the question that seems to be posed is, where is your elsewhere? A question, I suggest, that is hinted at in the Feurer and Lindberg images and a proposition that is always implicit in Kawakubo’s collections.

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FIGURE 10.2   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Ceremony of Separation collection, Autumn/Winter 2015–16, Paris Fashion Week, 7 March 2015.

Surrealism and fashion: Elsewhere and otherness A connection to the concept of elsewhere in relationship to Kawakubo’s work is offered by Michael Stone-Richards in his catalogue essay ‘I am a Cat: A Dossier on Comme des Garçons and Surréalisme’, for the exhibition ReFusing Fashion. Stone-Richards’ stated intention is ‘to show the way in which there is a distinctive sense in which Kawakubo’s procedures stand apart from the

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available mechanisms for the generation of form in high fashion’.73 The major focus of his discussion is Six, the biannual publication that was produced by Comme des Garçons for promotional purposes from 1988 to 1991. Although, as Stone-Richards notes, both surrealism and constructivism were ‘prevailing’ references for the various issues, it is surrealism ‘from beginning to end’ that predominates.74 Reviewing the ‘strategic deployment of artists as well as practices long associated with or belonging to the culture of Surrealism’, Six is framed as a ‘laboratory of ideas’.75 Stone-Richards argues that Kawakubo ‘makes Surrealism understood as a form of thinking in the fragmentation and collage integral to her procedures, just as … Six makes Surrealism integral to its procedures’.76 ‘Elsewhere’, however, is raised somewhat elliptically. Augmenting his conclusion that Kawakubo’s work is an ‘encounter between self, clothing and the world’, Stone-Richards refers to a proposition forwarded by Harold Koda, Richard Martin and Laura Sinderbrand (curators of an earlier exhibition in 1987)77 that ‘Rei Kawakubo reconciles clothing and the “elsewhere”’, ‘the loaded French word for elsewhere … ailleurs’.78 Quoted in part by Stone-Richards, Koda et al.’s argument both refers to the surrealist André Breton  –  ‘The unity between self and landscape, sought by Breton and others, is discovered by Kawakubo’79  –  and alludes to (what might be determined as) a particular rhetorical construction of fashion outlined by Barthes in The Fashion System that addresses ‘The geography of Fashion’ (under the broader heading ‘situations of place: sojourns and travels’).80 Asserting that alienation is at the heart of all notions of place, Barthes outlines two ‘elsewheres’: ‘a utopian “elsewhere”, represented by everything that is exotic … and a real “elsewhere”, which Fashion borrows from outside itself’.81 One fashion theorist who has taken up the critical ideas of surrealism in a decisive way is Elizabeth Wilson. In her article ‘Magic Fashion’ (2004), she investigates fashion’s sometimes more troubling and contradictory dimensions, linking a possible future for fashion, through an exploration of the magical qualities of dress and the ‘very irrationality of fashion’, to the ‘hopeful’ example of surrealism’s commitment to the transformation of everyday life. Central to her argument is the proposition that it is ‘the very irrationality of fashion  –  its most often criticised aspect  –  that gives it significance’.82 Invoking connections to key surrealist concepts such as the uncanny and the marvellous, as well as its fetishizing forces, Wilson asserts that the magical along with surrealism ‘still speaks to us today … when not only our bodies but our desires are in danger of being wholly commodified’.83 Ultimately positive in its outlook, Wilson’s line of reasoning can be located in relation to the liberatory potentials of Bretonian surrealism. While also exploring clothing’s ‘more elusive dimensions’,84 Michael Carter, by contrast, draws from the work of Roger Caillois, a thinker (influenced in part by the ideas of Bataille) at ‘the edge of surrealism’,85 in two related texts: Overdressed: Barthes,

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Darwin & the Clothes That Speak (2013) and ‘Stuff and Nonsense: The Limits of the Linguistic Model of Clothing’ (2012). The broad subject of his enquiry is the nature of the non-useful, namely ornament or the ‘ornamental flourish’, in conceptions of dress. Framed in relationship to the dominance of accounts of usefulness or utility, Carter merges an examination of Caillois’ definition of the non-utilitarian – a term that, as Carter points out, Caillois substitutes for the irrational  –  with a critique of ‘the [predominant] communicative, or linguistic model of dress, first articulated by … Barthes’.86 Exploring other ways to think about dress, Carter approaches his topic through ‘seeing what is already “known” through fresh theoretical perspectives’.87 Parallels could be drawn here between some of these concepts and Kawakubo’s work. Kawakubo’s insistence always on a return to zero resonates strongly, for example, with the conception of the surreal as a space of constant displacement; while the more encompassing description of the surreal as an ‘exploratory movement towards alterity’ could well describe a constant drive of her work. The concept of encounter, approached by Stone-Richards through the relationship of self, clothing and the world, is also evident in the presentation of Kawakubo’s collections. It is increasingly expressed in a marked way through the contributions of both scenography and choreography (beyond that of conventional staging) as a vital component in the overall conception of her work.88 For the surrealists, an experimental attitude was an integral part of their engagement with the everyday. An attitude of openness and availability to the experience of encounter  –  including a sense of the unexpected – contributed to an evocation of the marvellous and engendered the revelation of unconscious desire. Such activities held transformative potential for the surrealists creating the possibility – as Breton outlines in the first Manifesto of Surrealism – of a resolution between dream and reality, ‘a surreality’.89 As noted earlier, the issue of otherness persists as a challenge in the reception of Kawakubo’s work. Interpreted for a significant period in terms of cultural otherness, it is occasionally referred to now in an abstract sense – as a type of abstracted other. From time to time, however, it is also named as a meditation on fashion itself. In concluding the previous section, I posed the dynamic of encounter in Kawakubo’s work as the insistent rendering of something other to ourselves. While elaborated in connection to ‘an aesthetics of astonishment’, following the example of surrealism, this formulation could be considered further to suggest that what might be at stake in Kawakubo’s rendering is perhaps less something outside ourselves than the possible reconceptualization of otherness within or in relationship to the self that arises from the moment or experience of encounter. Rather than the resolution of the opposing states of dream and reality as advocated by Breton, Kawakubo consistently frames her work in relationship to freedom. The linking of her processes (through her own assertions) to

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‘the mere act of living daily life’ resonates to a degree with the surrealists’ engagement with the everyday.90 On a more significant level, however, what is strongly at play in both is a relationship to the present. For the surrealists, this is evidenced through the centrality of the domain of experience to their practice; while for Kawakubo it is expressed through her unequivocal intention of ‘always wanting to do something new that hasn’t existed before’. This drive for novelty combined with the insistent return to zero sets up an encounter entirely in the present. The ‘capacity [of her work] to impinge on the present’, to interrupt our consciousness through creating a rupture in what we see and know contributes to its radicality. In some commentaries, this trait is often associated with an outside of fashion. Koda, as mentioned, identifies the origins of Kawakubo’s aesthetic practice as outside of fashion. Curator Akiko Fukai has also commented on an ‘outside of fashion’ in relation to Kawakubo’s work. Noting the approach by selected designers to the area of ‘Fashion as media’ in her essay for the exhibition Future Beauty, Fukai observes the ‘close attention’ that Kawakubo has paid ‘to the special qualities of print media’ for the ‘expression of her image of fashion’. Yet, in summarizing, she remarks that ‘These publications [including Six] are an indication of Kawakubo’s ambition to “try expressing myself outside fashion”’.91 The proposition of ‘elsewhere’ also points to an outside of fashion. In their 1987 essay Koda, Martin and Sinderbrand invoke, through an allusion to Barthes, a ‘separate and often indeterminate “elsewhere”, outside the article of clothing’. Their claim, however, is that ‘Rei Kawakubo reconciles clothing and the “elsewhere”. She bonds the individual and the world through the garment.’92 Subsequently, investigating what could be perceived as the ‘how’ of this, Stone-Richards contextualizes ‘elsewhere’ in relationship to surrealism.93 Significantly, beyond its poetic dimension (of an imagined geographical other), what is implicitly at work in the surrealist definition is an active (political and philosophical) responsiveness to an external reality  –  a responsiveness that includes an openness to otherness and the transformation of daily life. A defining paradox of Kawakubo’s work is both its disavowal and affirmation of fashion. Frequently interpreted as a puzzle of intention, this dynamic is often taken as a major provocation of her work. The question of ‘elsewhere’ and its contextualization in relationship to surrealism, however, offers a different set of parameters from which insights might be gained. Following the double-sidedness of the above paradox, the framing of elsewhere as a rhetorical question (where is your elsewhere) suggests a reflexive movement: a movement away, to a place or space ‘outside’, in this instance, from fashion; and, through its openness and appeal to possibility, a return to the proposition itself. It is also a question about desire – formulated not simply with the intention of eliciting the nomination of a specific site or space, but of invoking a process of thinking that accompanies an awakening of desire,

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somewhat like Barthes’ address of his ‘longing to inhabit’ in Camera Lucida.94 It is also a question that emerges from an openness to otherness and the experience of encounter. Both are central to Kawakubo’s work, part of her responsiveness to the everyday. However, it is not a showy, self-conscious transcription. While sometimes seemingly enigmatic or elusive, it is instead an engagement that invites a critical consciousness. Here we might connect again to Barthes’ conception of ‘the third form’. Along with ‘an attempt to write in a new way, an attempt to be both analytical and expressive at the same time’, the ‘third form’, in Barthes’ words, ‘supposes a mobile, plural reader … who begins to write with me’.95 As Batchen has observed (following Sartre’s existential influence on Barthes), it is a form of writing that ‘involves a mutually productive exchange of responsibilities between reader and writer’.96 Echoing an evocation of desire central to Camera Lucida – ‘it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’97 – Batchen also describes Barthes’ ‘textual practice’ as ‘inviting the reader to induce something  … that exceeds the intentions of its author’.98 While what is insistently rendered might be described as something other to ourselves, a fundamental address of Kawakubo’s work is our capacity to imagine ourselves. Similar to Batchen’s suggestion ‘that readers are taken on a quest that is as much about themselves (about “consciousness”) as photography’, a comparable politics of exchange might also be imagined between Kawakubo and her audience.99 Asserting a conception of fashion based on freedom, Kawakubo’s approach might be understood as one of critical resistance. More crucially, however, with its insistent experimental attitude and resulting ontological sensibility – its recurring scrutiny of what fashion is ‘in itself’ – we might also conclude that for her part Kawakubo construes fashion not simply as something that might be open to a particular poetics of thinking but as a radical form of consciousness altogether.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1963–1980, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985, p. 82. 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, p. 12. 3 Nancy Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1997, p. xxii. 4 Barthes, Camera Lucida, n. 2, p. 8. 5 Barthes, Grain of the Voice, n. 1, p. 356. 6 Kawakubo is widely quoted as stating (versions of) ‘Freedom and a spirit of defiance are the sources of my energy’.

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7 I borrow this expression from Batchen; he uses it to refer to Barthes’ text in Geoffrey Batchen (ed.), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011. 8 See on this Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’, Fashion Theory 8(4), 2004, pp. 375–86; and Michael Carter, ‘Stuff and Nonsense: The Limits of the Linguistic Model of Clothing’, Fashion Theory 16(3), 2012, pp. 343–54. 9 Michael Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, in ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, 2008, p. 111. 10 Harold Koda, Richard Martin and Laura Sinderbrand, Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell and Rei Kawakubo, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 24 February to 18 April 1987. 11 Michael Carter, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes, Berg, London, 2003, p. 243. 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, n. 2, p. 4 13 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 51. 14 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 10. 15 Carter, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’, n. 8, p. 352. 16 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 260. 17 Barthes’ writing is frequently categorized into distinct phases coterminous with each decade from the 1950s. 18 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 9. 19 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 71. 20 First published in 1967; English translation published 1985. 21 Andy Stafford, ‘Afterword; Clothes, Fashion and System in the Writings of Roland Barthes: “Something out of Nothing”’, in Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, Power Publications, Sydney, 2006, p. 120. 22 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 10. 23 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 67. 24 Cited in Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 67. 25 Harold Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, in ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, 2008, p. 23. 26 Barthes, Grain of the Voice, n. 1, p. 8. 27 Barbara Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, in Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Merrell, London, 2008, p. 27. 28 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 27. 29 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 34. 30 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 35. 31 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 35. 32 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, n. 25, p. 34. 33 The link that Vinken makes is through an inversion of classical understandings of the veiled body.

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34 Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘In the Words of … Rei Kawakubo: The Rules are in my Head’, System 2, 2013, p. 39. 35 Jacques Hyzagi, ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Radical Chic’, The Observer, 20 September 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/sep/20/rei-kawakubo-radicalchic) accessed 4 April 2022. 36 Judith Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, in ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, 2008, p. 67. 37 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing, University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 7. Approaching Bourgeois’ work through a close engagement with just one of her sculptures, Bal writes against ‘biographism’ – the subordination of the analysis of work to a biographical model of writing. 38 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, n. 25, p. 23. 39 Dorinne Kondo, ‘Through Western Eyes: Japanese Fashion in the 1980s’, Dresstudy 57 Spring 2010, n.p.; About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre, Routledge, New York, 1997, p. 148. 40 Obrist, ‘In the Words of … Rei Kawakubo’, n. 34, p. 42. 41 ‘Creative Manifesto’, in Obrist, ‘In the Words of … Rei Kawakubo’, n. 34. 42 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, n. 25, p. 35. See, for example, Sarah Mower, ‘Fight Club’, Vogue (US), September 2006, pp. 660–69. 43 Koda, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, n. 25, p. 24. 44 See, for example, recent collections such as the Autumn/Winter 2015–16 Ceremony of Separation and the Spring/Summer 2016 Blue Witch. 45 Judy Annear, ‘Rei Kawakubo – Warrior Woman of International Fashion and Design. From Tokyo, The Leader of Comme des Garçons talks to Monument’, Monument 1(3), 1994, p. 28. 46 I borrow this expression from Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 132. It refers specifically to Baudelaire’s capacity to impinge on the present by apprehending its layers, and is part of a larger discussion of the influence of surrealism on Benjamin and the enhanced place surrealism is consequently accorded in relation to studies of the everyday. 47 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 75. 48 Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’, n. 8, p. 213. 49 Roland Barthes, ‘Fashion and the Social Sciences’, in Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, Power Publications, Sydney, 2006, p. 86. 50 Sheringham, Everyday Life, n. 46, p. 181. 51 Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 286. 52 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2003, p. 58. 53 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, n. 52, 14.

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54 Roland Barthes, ‘The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges’, in Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, Power Publications, Sydney, 2006, p. 109. 55 Barthes, ‘The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges’, n. 54, p. 109. 56 Barthes, ‘The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges’, n. 54, p. 109. 57 Widely reported. 58 Koda, for example, observes that ‘Even in the context of its uncompromised commercial intent … the disparate parts of her business … comprise a unified project’, ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Art of Fashion’, n. 25, p. 23. 59 A sensibility I would suggest is explored further in the Comme des Garçon website (http://www.comme-des-garcons.com) accessed 28 September 2021. 60 Here we might connect to Ulrich Lehmann’s assertion that ‘Fashion only exists in representation’, ‘Fashion Photography’, in Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2002, n.p. 61 ‘Dazed or Something’ (https://www.pinterest.com.au/ pin/225602262554551029/) accessed 6 April 2022. 62 Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media, I.B. Tauris, London, 2009, p. 133. 63 Akiko Fukai, ‘Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion’, in Catherine Ince and Rie Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Merrell, London, 2008, pp. 13–14. 64 Kondo, ‘Through Western Eyes’, n. 39, p. 120. 65 Kondo, ‘Through Western Eyes’, n. 39, p. 118. 66 Barthes, ‘Fashion and the Social Sciences’, n. 49, p. 94. 67 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 34. 68 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 121. 69 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, pp. 122, 121. 70 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 123. 71 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, pp. 121, 123–24. 72 Vinken, ‘The Empire Designs Back’, n. 27, p. 123. 73 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 110. 74 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 102. 75 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 102. 76 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 110. 77 Koda, Martin and Sinderbrand, Three Women, n. 10. Stone-Richards refers to it as ‘the first serious exhibition in [the United States] of Kawakubo’, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 111. 78 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 111. 79 Koda, Martin and Sinderbrand, Three Women, n. 10, n.p. 80 The reference to Barthes paraphrases an uncited source: ‘Barthes has spoken of the garment’s separate and often indeterminate “elsewhere”, the

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81 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990, pp. 251–52. While qualifying how ‘Fashion’ experiences these places – ‘their essence must be apprehended at a single stroke’ – Barthes also reminds us that ‘Fashion is a rapid succession of absolute sites’, p. 252. 82 Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’, n. 8, p. 383. 83 Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’, n. 8, p. 383. 84 Michael Carter, Overdressed: Barthes, Darwin & the Clothes That Speak, Puncher and Wattmann, Glebe, 2013, p. 9. 85 To cite the title of the following collection of Callois’ writings: Roger Callois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Callois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003. 86 Carter, Overdressed, n. 84, p. 9. 87 Carter, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’, n. 8, p. 349. 88 See, for example, runway video of the following RTW (women’s) collections: Autumn/Winter 2015–16, Spring/Summer 2017 and Autumn/Winter 2017–18. The models do not simply pass or file by each other but pause in a marked way to convey the sense of an encounter. This action is elaborated into a more extended (spatial) movement across the stage in the presentation of the Autumn/Winter 2017–18 collection. 89 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, 1969, p. 14. 90 As quoted in Cathy Horyn, ‘Like Mona Lisa, Ever So Veiled’, New York Times, 30 May 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/fashion/rei-kawakuboof-comme-des-garcons-veiled-like-mona-lisa.html) accessed 28 September 2021. 91 Fukai, ‘Future Beauty’, n. 63, p. 21. 92 Koda, Martin and Sinderbrand, Three Women, n. 10, n.p. 93 Stone-Richards, ‘I am a Cat’, n. 9, p. 111. 94 Barthes, Grain of the Voice, n. 1, pp. 40–1. See Section 16, ‘To waken desire’. Barthes describes this ‘longing to inhabit’ as ‘Neither oneric … nor empirical … it is fantasmatic, deriving from a second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself’, p. 40. 95 Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography, n. 3, p. 67. 96 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 4. 97 Barthes, Camera Lucida, n. 2, p. 55. 98 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 8. 99 Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, n. 7, p. 269.

11 Between clothing and flesh: Kawakubo at the Met Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

The basic definition, and grounding empirical premise, of clothing is that it is what covers the body. Or, as G.W.F. Hegel proposed, clothing was intended to cover the imperfections of the ‘skin’: ‘The small feeble animal-like tissues – blood vessels, wrinkles, lanugo, hair, etc … the contour lines that pulsate from life … [are] incorporated into the clothing.’1 The next presumption is that, in its historical arc, clothing proceeds from necessity (protection from the elements) to fashion, wherein necessity is only one integer among many. The body is core, and clothing proceeds from it. It is a comforting and altogether simple logical frame. But it has all the deceptiveness of any easy truth. For the problem with origins is that it is a story that is written from the perspective of what comes after. In this case, the body is seen as originary and essential only by dint of the clothing that is placed on it. In other words, the body is but the blank canvas to be overlaid with something that bespeaks intention and invention. But this way of thinking is also not satisfactory, since bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and are also subject to determinations of class, race, sexuality and gender. It is also these determinations that cut across body and clothing, showing the relationship to be a mixture of the material and the linguistic. The body is never alone, and clothing is never alone. The body exists to-be-clothed, while clothing without a body forever suggests itself as to-beworn (even in such cases when a garment is unwearable). These dichotomies were placed at the centre of the 2017 exhibition of Rei Kawakubo’s work at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Met), entitled Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. As the

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FIGURE 11.1   Cubisme in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017. second living designer to be exhibited at the Met (the first was Yves St Laurent in 1983), the solo exhibition was a retrospective that highlighted themes that have influenced (and continue to influence) the designer’s oeuvre in a career spanning over forty years from the early 1980s through to her Future of the Silhouette (Autumn/Winter 2017–18) collection and beyond. (See Figure 11.1.)

In the beginning there was Kawakubo When Kawakubo first arrived on the Paris fashion scene in the early 1980s with her Comme des Garçon label, her garments were met with hesitation, confusion and at times derision. Her runway collection, Destroy (Autumn/

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Winter 1982–3) contained garments that were shredded and bedraggled, evoking a sense of decay and ruin, such as the ‘hole sweater’, a black handknitted jumper that contained randomly placed holes. It was as though the jumper had lain long forgotten in a wardrobe only to be eaten by moths. This was not the case, though. In fact, Kawakubo intentionally created the holes in the sweater by loosening the screws in the knitting machine. Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) labelled her collection as ‘The Hiroshima bag-lady look’,2 and Joan Kraner, vice president and fashion director of New York retailer Bergman Goodman, said that Kawakubo’s clothes ‘were interesting to look at, [but] difficult to wear’. In an interview with the Village Voice, Kraner asked: How much do people want to look tattered? You have to have a large pair of shoulders and the right attitude to wear them. Most are bulky layers. They do nothing for the figure, and for all the money going into health and fitness, why look like a shopping bag lady?3 The groundbreaking Destroy collection opened up an entirely new sartorial syntax of pre-stressed and pre-worn clothing and ‘introduced the idea of patina and aging to Paris’.4 This new chic was a direct onslaught on Western notions of high fashion and class, in which the best haute couture was always expected to be a combination of the best tailoring and the best fabrics, and in the traditions of conspicuous consumption a garment was discarded upon signs of wear. With wear placed at the epicentre of the garment’s meaning Kawakubo introduced suggestions of history and the ghost. The body’s relationship to the garment was thus in the wake of the garment’s better times. The lived body was the shadow, or the echo, of the body – that never existed, and therefore was consigned to the void – that had had the benefit of the garment unsullied and unscathed. (‘The void is important’, said Kawakubo in 1985.) From very early in Kawakubo’s career the primacy of the body in the originary logic of body-clothing, body-garment is displaced. For what the Destroy and other collections of this period announced was that the lived wearer’s body was always subsequent, always second, or perhaps even third or fourth, happy in hand-me-downs, with the original owner a phantom, an empty predecessor. This void is the chiasmus at the origin of language (between speech and writing) and existing in the world (body and clothing). A further affront to Western tastes was that Kawakubo’s collection was monochromatic or black, a colour that had fallen out of style by the opulent 1980s in favour of the bright pinks and greens of Christian Lacroix, Gianni Versace and Claude Montana, or Giorgio Armani’s shades of browns and navies. By contrast, Kawakubo was reported as saying ‘Red is Black’ at the time.5 As Judith Thurman writes, ‘so many entitlements were challenged by the black regime of Comme des Garçons that it is hard not to see its

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commandant as a Red’.6 Thurman was not alluding to the colour red, but rather she was associating Kawakubo’s revolutionary aesthetic with that of communism and the Eastern bloc. From the very beginning of her career, Kawakubo has been situated as one of the leaders of the so-called ‘Japanese Revolution’ in fashion that occurred since the 1970s with designers such as Kenzo Takada, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamomoto, Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi and Tao Kurihara. There can be no doubt that Kawakubo and her contemporaries introduced approaches to tailoring, textile treatment and overall form and silhouette that were unlike what was considered appropriate to fine Western clothing in the 1970s and 1980s. And it is natural for influence to be inferred a posteriori, in other words to trace influence backward to an original based on a formal or semantic difference in the present. It is also common sense to suggest that for anyone, in this case a designer, the culture of origin has a bearing on the way in which clothing is seen, made and understood. Further, when Kawakubo became known for her stressed, spoliated and tarnished garments that became synonymous with the catchword ‘destroy’ (and hence by extension ‘deconstruction’, however loosely and inaccurately used), she was viewed as a Japanese designer responding to the era after the mass nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also in the 1970s and 1980s, with the generation following those who had lived through or witnessed the Second World War, that an increasing number of artists were engaging in the questions of wartime inheritance: guilt, recognition and restitution. It is a connection that is as compelling as it is tenable, and it is perhaps because of this that Kawakubo energetically rejects, as she does, any close relation between her work and her Japanese roots (despite the fact that Kawakubo resides for the large part in Tokyo, not Paris or New York). There may be a discernible difference in her work, but it need not be taken to be discernibly Japanese as such. In the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, writing on her in the late 1990s, Kawakubo’s fashions are ‘the-same-yet-not-the-same, different-but-not-different’.7 Kawakubo’s garments were also considered a slight to Western ideas concerning fashion and style, beauty and gender. They contained holes, tears, rips, bumps and padding in places on the body that were not considered fashionably erotic. Her use of padding created a masculinized female form that was in opposition to the fashion of the 1980s that promoted shoulder pads to create an A-line silhouette and what became known as ‘power dressing’ in fashion discourse. Garments designed to fit executive women, who wore ‘power suits’ to the office and spandex lycra tights to the gym. In every possible way, the ‘New Woman’ of the 1980s was immersed in work, and status and raw ambition were celebrated. She was a woman in control of her sexuality, her career and her body, and dress became her armour. She wore jackets with broad shoulder pads that tapered to a narrow waistline and

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figure-hugging pencil skirts with hemlines below the knees to extend the length of her legs. Her choices of shoes were either pumps or stilettoes worn to enhance her height. It was the era of the supermodel and height was equated with power and action. The ideal woman was weaponized and Amazonian in proportions, much like the television action girls or the superheroes from the pages of American comic books. Rather than promoting this asymmetrical body that exemplified the classical Western ideal, Kawakubo’s designs distorted the balance of the body, producing unorthodox relations between form, silhouette, clothing and flesh. Kawakubo was not interested in clothes that showed the body. She liked ‘the idea of wrapping, like clothes from the Mideast’.8 Voluminous shapes replaced straight lines, and androgynous forms melded gender and obscured the shape of women’s bodies. Although Kawakubo’s intention was to design clothes for the self-sufficient modern working woman, in her mind they were garments for women ‘who did not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds’.9

Avant-garde titan Kawakubo’s designs have been alternately labelled ‘avant-garde’ and ‘deconstructive’. Avant-garde is the more problematic since it is a term used in art history for the leading artists and movements in modernism. One of the key characteristics of postmodernism, and beyond, is the lack of a discernible style, group or artist that has gone beyond a status quo to found a new aesthetic establishment. Art’s pluralism and its imbrication in commercial markets and popular culture has made such a schema impossible. However, in fashion, where the term continues to circulate, ‘avant-garde’ is used for garments that by and large challenge what clothing should be, and that stretch the limits of wearability. Clothing that is experimental in design and innovative in shape, volume and silhouette that tests conventional ideas about the body. The applicability of ‘avant-garde’ can continue to be justified according to the assertion that the curator of the exhibition, Andrew Bolton, makes that ‘Kawakubo is the archetypal modernist designer, a status that is perhaps most ardently expressed in her constant search for and ever-evolving notions of originality, or what she calls “newness”’.10 As a result Bolton suggests that invoking deconstruction with respect to Kawakubo is misplaced. However, as we demonstrate elsewhere and below, deconstruction offers some enormously stimulating philosophical subtexts to be brought to the fore. Indeed, ‘deconstruction’ has been employed by Kawakubo more specifically since her very earliest collections. And as we have argued in Critical Fashion

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Practice from Westwood to Van Beirendonk (2017), the related term applied to architecture, ‘deconstructivism’, is the more apt, as it retains the same problematics of deconstruction, while also emphasizing the margins between the stability and instability of physical structures.11 Deconstruction, a philosophical system that is synonymous with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (although not limited to him), is a method that is a form of understanding. That is, one actively ‘deconstructs’ a text (written, visual or otherwise) to produce a reversal or at least a destabilization of established, habitual views that the text appears to espouse or represent. These views begin with binary systems, such as that of body-clothing, with which we started this chapter. Essence–appearance, inside–outside, conscious–unconscious, and all other binary systems, which form the basis of the knowledge that is our sense of the world and our place in it, rely on biases and suppositions that are frequently repressed in the interests of maintaining relations of power. Deconstruction’s campaign against these relations has made it an attractive philosophical strategy for postcolonial theorists and feminists, among others, who are concerned with the presumptions within language that may impede what they see as a fairer and more equitable discourse. One of the recurrent binaries for Derrida is that of speech and writing, which he conveniently parallels with body and garment. As he writes in his essay on the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’: Writing is the sensory matter and the artificial exteriority: ‘clothing’. It has sometimes been contested speech is the clothing of thought. Husserl, Saussure, Lavelle are not lacking on this point. But has one ever doubted that writing is the clothing of speech? Even for Saussure it was a clothing of perversion, of laxity, a garment (habit) of corruption and disguise, a party mask (masque de) that has to be exorcised, that is, by good speech: ‘Writing veils language’s sight: it is not clothing but a travesty’. A strange ‘image’. One already hopes that if writing is an external ‘image’ and ‘figuration’, then this ‘representation’ is not innocent. The outside communicates a relationship with the inside which, as always, is nothing less than simple exteriority. The sense of the outside has always been on the inside, outside of the outside, and the obverse.12 Derrida also draws on the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to contest the unquestioned positioning of speech as natural and writing as belonging to the realm of culture. By then polemicizing this binary and placing writing first and speech second, the result is to see them in a dynamic relation to each other, each generative of and reliant on the other. For this relationship, Derrida coins the word différance. Différance is the proverbial space in-between, and the nature of this space is that it is never stable or fixed, but mobile and engendering.

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Before turning to the ways in which these concepts were explored in Kawakubo’s retrospective, it is worth also turning to an essay from the same period in which Derrida reflects on ‘exteriority’ in Emmanuel Levinas’ magnum opus Totality and Infinity, subtitled ‘Essay on Exteriority’. ‘Exteriority’ as Derrida contends is for Levinas not so much a spatial concept as the space of the Other. But if exteriority is to be thought without being spatial what is it? This is because the Other occupies the space of the Same. One therefore has to think of true exteriority as non-exteriority, that is, again across the structure of Inside-Outside as the spatial metaphor, which must occupy the metaphor as ruin, clothed [s’habiller] in the tatters of tradition and the rags of the devil, signifying perhaps that this philosophical logos cannot in the first instance [d’abord] expatriate itself from the structure of InsideOutside.13 Later Derrida avers that ‘the significations that emanate from Inside-Outside, from Light-Night, etc., are not only occupied by prescribed words; they are lodged, in person in procuration, at the heart of conceptuality itself’.14 Let us not be distracted by the rhetorical complexity or the broader concerns of these passages, and rather concentrate on, first, the fact that Derrida uses metaphors of clothing once again. Second, he invokes the ruin, which would be a salient and ongoing trope in his dialogues with deconstructivist architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, and is one that would come to circulate regularly around commentaries on Kawakubo. Third, Derrida, albeit cryptically in these fragments, makes a semantically regular distinction between inside and outside and interior and exterior. This binary dynamic, however, obscures the fact that they are co-dependent concepts, with the meaning of one coincident upon the meaning of the other. Hence the word for this coincidence calls for a new concept altogether. Yet the persistence of these binaries emphasizes their status as ruins. They are inescapable; yet, like ruins, the empty spaces, what is now lost, provide the opportunity for speculative possibility. Where does this leave the ‘in-between’ with regard to Kawakubo? The inbetween is a contrarian (and hence the use in fashion circles of ‘avant-garde’) stance as it is neither one nor the other but sits somewhere between the two, although not necessarily in the same place each time. Extrapolating from Derrida’s (somewhat mystical) words above, the in-between is, to use another Derridean term, a supplement in that it compensates for the ruins of the one or the other. The in-between is never any fixed alternative to the one or the other in the sense of a resolution from dialectical conflict, as characterized by the Hegelian Aufhebung (commonly translated as ‘sublation’). Rather the inbetween is both the truth and the remainder of the one and the other, and can

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exist only by dint of the persistence of the two imperfect poles – in this case, the dichotomy of body and clothing. For a persistent theme in Kawakubo’s oeuvre is to announce the body–clothing binary through various strategies of slippage and the undermining of the notion. Many of the titles of her collections attest to this to various degrees. For example: Holes (Autumn/Winter 1982–3), Movement (Spring/Summer 1989), Liberation from Tailoring (Next New One) (Autumn/Winter 1989–90), Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body (Spring/ Summer 1997), Fusion (Autumn/Winter 1998–9), Inside Decoration (Autumn/ Winter 2010–11), Not Making Clothing (Spring/Summer 2014) and Invisible Clothes (Spring/Summer 2017). Kawakubo evinces a constant rebarbative sensibility against convention. For Kawakubo, clothes are the body.

Exhibiting Kawakubo In unravelling the binary of body and dress, the exhibition at the Met was divided into eight thematic dichotomies: ‘Design/Not Design’, ‘Fashion/Anti-Fashion’, ‘Model/Multiple’, ‘High/Low’, ‘Then/Now’, ‘Self/Other’, ‘Object/Subject’ and ‘Clothes/Not Clothes’. The exhibition’s overall configuration was like a futuristic hangar containing sculptural objects, or containers that housed, sheltered and abutted the displays. There were cylinders, there were arcs and cubicles that connoted a science fiction children’s theme park. High modern gravitas collided with free play. (Bolton commented that the display was ‘almost like a playground’.15) Curiously, these sculptural allotments, the irregular partitioning of space and space-within-a-space are echoed in a less dramatic fashion in Kawakubo‘s own boutiques, in which arcs, curved walls and diagonal partitions beckon to the consumer to have as unconventional an attitude to movement as he or she may in thinking about the body and the garment.16 On entry the viewer is struck by red ensembles from three different collections, Body Meets Dress  –  Dress Meets Body (Spring/Summer, 1997), 2 Dimensions (Autumn/ Winter, 2012–13) and Invisible Clothes (Spring/Summer, 2017). These collections immediately confront the theme of how Kawakubo disrupts the body–clothing relation. Conventionally, in ‘classic’ tailoring, clothing ‘suits’ the body through sympathy with its contours, its irregularities and its demands. Classic tailoring abides by comfort, hence the ‘wearability’ that places the movement of the body at a premium. However, like much of Kawakubo’s work, these garments do not comply with the concept of regular or ideal body shape, nor do they echo the shape of the (in this case hypothetical) wearer. Instead, they hide and distort the body, in some instances with bulges and protuberances that are inconsistent with the ‘natural’ flow of bodily shape. The disavowal to the point of violation of the ‘natural’ body was memorably challenged in the Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection, otherwise

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referred to as ‘Lumps and Bumps’, because of the many padded extrusions in the garment, which made a woman appear as if beset with a large cancerous growth, or as if a hip or breast had displaced itself onto an area it should not have been. The stretched gingham hugged abnormally large and irregular buttocks or uneven bulky shoulders creating an impression of the body, as Louise Mitchell puts it, as ‘distended, extended and relocated’.17 The garments enhanced rather than concealed the buttocks, expanded the waistline rather than drawing it in, and the backs of garments protruded into humps, as though the wearer was a hunchback the likes of Quasimodo. It was as though Kawakubo wanted ‘to explode the arguments surrounding the size of the flesh … to push [the body] out into negative space, to embrace diversity rather than the homogeneity of the flesh’.18 Not only to question the limits of the body and the flesh, but to expose the fragility of gender norms and their conventions. Kawakubo approached this project in an analogous way to an architect who devises a building as a conglomerate of separate spaces. Hence she was designing the body as opposed to designing a garment per se. As Kawakubo comments: ‘I wanted to design the body itself, and I wanted to use stretch fabrics. I was keenly aware of the difficulty of expressing something using garments alone. And that is how I arrived at the concept of designing the body.’19 She would reprise this method much later in the collection Inside Decoration (Autumn/ Winter 2010–11), when she affixed pillow-like units to shoulders, hips and torso, adding bulk and creating a disorienting silhouette. (See Figure 11.2.)

FIGURE 11.2   Inside Decoration in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between, Costume Institute Press Preview at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 May 2017.

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While designs such as these can be used to mount a critique of bodily conventions, as they so often do, they are, crucially, products of Kawakubo’s own emotional being. As she states: ‘Nothing new can come out of a situation without suffering.’ It is a statement that can be taken as romantic Sturm und Drang, or it can be productively extrapolated as the ennui that arises out of a dissatisfaction with habitual relationships. It is the anxiety over the perennial ruin, the realization that nothing is complete but rather in a state of endless process. In true Heraclitean fashion, Kawakubo confirms that: My design process never starts or finishes. I am always trying to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. There is never a mood board, I do not go through fabric swatches, I do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new … Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never-ending.20 This condition of the endless experiment in which the modulations of being are echoed in the object is explored in the category ‘Design/Not Design’. It explores Kawakubo’s concern with process, the key to which is the unfinished, where the sketch or prototype – even if not physical, it can be understood in the abstract sense of the unrealized or proleptic stage – is then translated into clothing, and where the emphasis is on the passage of translation as opposed to full fruition and resolution. The garments in this section include from Crush (Spring/Summer 2013) a dress that looks as if it is compiled from randomly folded, wadded and crumpled masses of fabric. Then, from Eccentric (Spring/ Summer 1994), the gowns are in a classic Greco-Roman revivalist style, gathered and slung over the top half of the body then falling to the floor, as if skillfully improvised from one bolt of cloth. Similarly, from Clustering Beauty (Spring/Summer 1998), the garment is frayed and sits on the body as if thrown and landed with happenstance, and with that the fragility that it could fall away at any moment. Equally as intriguing are the pieces from Adult Punk (Autumn/ Winter 1997–8) and Adult Delinquent (Spring/Summer 2010), in which the swatches and off-cuts in the studio have grafted themselves onto the garment like fabric parasites, turning the wearer into a permanent work-in-progress. Similarly, in the Fusion pieces, a side is cut away, there are incisions where there should not be, and the asymmetries are taken to an extreme. There is a near contempt for the body, a kind of aesthetic coercion here, where the language of the garment is not on the catwalk but permanently on the cuttingroom floor awaiting the designer’s whim. The body, then, is announced as abstracted and wholly contingent, much as a live tailor’s mannequin whose

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purpose is not for outward show but merely to provide a living support for the garment’s creation. Paradoxically, the one-off uniqueness of these garments is inscribed with the concept of the body-as-cipher. As opposed to the other categories, ‘Model/Multiple’ focuses on one collection, Abstract Excellence (Spring/Summer 2004), consisting of thirty-four skirts. These skirts gave the illusion that they were the same, with variations for the way they fall and fit, when in truth each one was unique. Of this collection Kawakubo states that her objective was to design ‘from shapeless, abstract intangible forms, not taking into account the body. The best item to express the collection is the skirt.’21 After all, the skirt only requires a waist from which to hang, and its shape is forever changing. ‘High/Low’ dealt with street style. This is dominated by the collections Bad Taste (Autumn/Winter 2008–9) and Motorbike Ballerina (Spring/Summer 2005), about which Kawakubo asserted that ‘There’s value in bad taste’, knowing full well that it was an act of aesthetic brinkmanship that conveniently turned bad taste on its head to become good taste. In Motorbike Ballerina Kawakubo combined tutus with biker-style jackets. She was, as Bolton states, ‘confusing two types of garments, but also conflating notions of élite and popular culture’.22 The clash of textures came with the inscrutability of leather against the diaphanous delicacy of tulle. In Bad Taste Kawakubo uses the idioms of punk and a fetish for garments that are anything but, being conservative frocks, one even with a false collar finished with a tie. The fabrics are ostensibly cheap, such as polyester. The dissonance of style and material ultimately begs the question of where and to whom such garments belong. Kawakubo constantly emphasizes that she is not one to look back, and therefore when she quotes from history it is for the sake of redefining it. (How exactly this compares to Westwood’s plundering of history makes for another informative discussion.) The ‘Then/Now’ section is a repudiation of historical styles through their reinvention, with particular reference to the exaggerated and cumbersome bustles of the nineteenth century. This involved the collections Sweeter than Sweet (Autumn/Winter 1995–6), Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body and White Drama (Spring/Summer 2012). In each case, the traditional silhouette was recast. An important aspect of many of these pieces was the extent to which they restricted movement. Whereas collections such as Motorbike Ballerina merged what could be considered contradictory styles, the same was also the case in one of the larger sections, ‘Self/Other’, which included subsections of ‘East/West’, ‘Male/Female’ and ‘Child/Adult’. Kawakubo’s collection Cubisme (Spring/Summer 2007) used the angular geometric fragmentation of synthetic cubism to contain the newly synthesized culture of anime and kawaii (‘cute’) that has permeated into street style. This is a synthesis that freely melds Western and newly adapted futuristic fashions. It is closely aligned to cosplaying, which is now a global

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obsession that has continued to grow since its cross-cultural birth between Japan and the United States in the 1980s. For the Cubisme collection, the models had their faces whited out, which not only melded with the exclusive white–red–black key of the garments, but served to abstract them and render them cyborg-like, as in characters from anime or illustrated fiction. Several of the white, light, layered tulle dresses were emblazoned with one or two large red dots – no one could be blamed for reading the Japanese flag into this – and some of the torsos were affixed with high-raised white belts whose language of enclosure and propriety was mildly undermined by red gauze sleeves revealing bare arms. In deference to the Lolita look, the footwear was either black shoes with socks or modest red flat shoes – melding coquetry with decorum. While all of Kawakubo’s designs can be said to confront the gendered stereotypes of clothing, it is a concern amplified in Transcending Gender (Spring/Summer 1995), where baggy suit coats are matched with flowing tulle skirts from which emerge pants and plain leather shoes. Kawakubo paired men’s classical tailoring with layered skirts and oversized shirts that contained billowing ruffles. Her intention was to explode gender norms through the concept of ma, the Japanese approach to clothing construction that explores the space between the flesh and clothing, allowing the wearer greater freedom and flexibility. These new bodies with their exaggerated silhouettes, whether oversized or padded, created a new physicality that offers new ways of conceptualizing what it means to be masculine or feminine, or even human at all. Toying with the convention of the suit recurs in the Persona collection (Autumn/Winter 2006–7), in which it is translated for women’s wear, loose fitting with the classic line interrupted with redundant extra sleeves that splay out like mutant growths from the operative ones. With the obscurity of black, the multiple sleeves, when the hands move, have an Escher-effect of confusing where one thing finishes and another begins. Even more audacious experiments with shattering the clean silhouette occur in the intriguingly titled collection The Infinity of Tailoring (Autumn/Winter 2013–14), in which the elegant encounters the monstrous. In one case the two-piece suit has merged to become a single piece, while sections of suit jackets have been grafted onto the sleeves to look like smashed wings. In another of this series, the armature of the classic suit is again radically disrupted: with a fine grey check throughout, each side has not one but two bilious sleeves that have swallowed the hands. The pants are baggy knee-length shorts. A meeting of whimsy and violence occurs in the collections Cacophony (Spring/Summer 2008) and 2 Dimensions (Autumn/Winter 2012–13). Of the former Kawakubo states: ‘I started out thinking about disharmony and randomness, playing with the weird and unlikely mixes of fabrics, colours and

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patterns on the one hand, and working with shapes … that are not clothes on the other hand.’23 These make for clothes that at first look like they come from an improvised girl’s dress-up, although they have been finished with professional intent. In 2 Dimensions the clownish comes to the fore. The body becomes engulfed in variations that seem to have emanated from the children’s finger puppet, crafted from two flat halves (the material is similar to the characteristic felt used in such exercises). The colours are high key, and their bell-like shapes transform the wearer into something of an artificial flower. The section ‘Object/Subject’, as Bolton relates, is ‘about hybrid bodies, where the dress and the body becomes one’.24 This exhibit consisted exclusively in the Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection. Bolton comments that the bulges from goose-down feathers completely disfigured the body: so it was a celebration of deformity, which was challenging these normative conventions of beauty … they still stand out as one of the most provocative collections, more so because it was often done in very child-like and sweet bubble-gum pink gingham.25 Kawakubo’s mission has always been to disturb innocence. The final section, ‘Clothes/Not Clothes’, involved Kawakubo’s last eight collections up to the date of the exhibition. These are as a result of what she believed to be a ‘rupture’ in her design process that came about in spring 2014. At this point, in Bolton’s words, ‘she began to see fashion as objects on the body, more akin to conceptual art or performance art, it wasn’t really about wearability. Prior to that all her clothing was viable as clothing.’26 By breaking with this relationship, which is axiomatic to clothing, if only habitually, in that sense with which we opened this chapter, Kawakubo has been forced into the art–fashion debate, since all her latest garments are sculptures in which the body is somewhere, be it as absence or conjecture or possibility, but never as certainty. In her more recent collection the Future of the Silhouette (Autumn/ Winter 2017–18), Kawakubo goes beyond the concept of body-as-clothing to what she calls ‘non-fabric, no wovens, no fashion fabrics’.27 (See Figure 11.3.) Instead, the garments are materials intended to be moulded onto the body’s surface, what Suzy Menkes called ‘perambulating art’.28 Garments that are more like bulbous sculptures than clothes and made of reconstituted cloth that resemble carpet underlay. The Future of the Silhouette is no silhouette at all. Zero. In an early interview with Bernadine Norris of the New York Times, Kawakubo said that she likes to begin her design process from zero. ‘Each time I start from zero, sometimes it does not succeed. This time I think it has.’29 In many ways, the result of this rupture in her design practice might beg the question as to the death of the body, or rather its liberation. There is no

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FIGURE 11.3   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. The Future of the Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017. denying that the later works are still garments, which means that the body is present, if only through its absence and the degrees of impossibility that the garments announce. Its presence also lies in the judgement about the varying measures of impossibility that these pieces instantiate. Yet it is their insistence on standing alone that places them in-between, since the disavowed body – by degrees from garment to garment – is inherent to their ontology. In Kawakubo’s words, ‘I might design something that might not function as clothes. What’s more important is the spirit.’30 If the body is now the ruin, it is also the ghost whose presence, because intangible, is irrepressible.

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Notes 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 744–45. 2 Vicky Carnegy, Fashions of a Decade: The 1980s, Batsford, London, 1990, p. 66. 3 Hettie Judah, ‘Cultural Liberation Springing from Physical Liberation: Reception Study of the 1980s Avant-Garde’, in Karen Van Godtsenhoven et al. (eds), Fashion Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th Century Silhouette, Bloomsbury, London, 2016, p. 223. 4 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2003, p. 249. 5 Alexander Fury, ‘7 Key Themes in Kawakubo’s Career’, New York Times, ‘Fashion and Beauty’, 29 April 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/tmagazine/fashion/rei-kawakubo-comme-des-garcons-themes.html) accessed 26 February 2022. 6 Judith Thurman, ‘The Misfit’, The New Yorker, 4 July 2005 (http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/04/the-misfit-3) accessed 15 January 2022. 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 340. 8 Cited in Andrew Bolton, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017, p. 28. 9 Judah, ‘Cultural Liberation’, n. 3, p. 229. 10 Andrew Bolton, ‘Introduction: Art of the In-Between’, in Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017, p. 14. 11 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice: from Westwood to Van Beirendonck, Bloomsbury, London, 2017. 12 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, Minuit, Paris, 1967, p. 52. 13 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, Seuil, Paris, 1967, p. 165–66. Italics and capitalizations as in the original. 14 Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, n. 13, p. 166. 15 The Met, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’ (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=60yGE64Xzs4) accessed 13 February 2022. 16 We are grateful to Karen Benton for pointing this relationship out to us. 17 Louise Mitchell, ‘The Designers’, in Louise Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge. Fashion from Japan, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 2005, p. 55. 18 Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century, I.B Tauris, London, 2001, pp. 94–5. 19 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, n. 18, p. 55. 20 Rei Kawakubo in New York Times, 31 May 2012, cited in Bolton, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, n. 8, p. 221.

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21 Bolton, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, n. 8, p. 62. 22 The Met, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’, n. 15. 23 Cited in Bolton, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, n. 8, p. 124. 24 The Met, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’, n. 15. 25 The Met, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’, n. 15. 26 The Met, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’, n. 15. 27 Suzy Menkes, ‘Comme des Garçons. The Future of Silhouette’, Vogue, 5 March 2017 (http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/suzypfw-comme-des-garconsthe-future-of-silhouette) accessed 26 February 2022. 28 Menkes, ‘Comme des Garçons. The Future of Silhouette’, n. 27. 29 Bernadine Morris, ‘From Japan. New Faces. New Shapes’, New York Times, 14 December 1982 (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/14/style/from-japannew-faces-new-shapes.html) accessed 15 January 2022. 30 Cited in Bolton, Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, n. 8, p. 148.

12 Kawakubo’s solipsism: The art of the in-between at the Met Amelia Winata

Introduction Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between (4 May to 4 September 2017) was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 offering for its annual Costume Institute exhibition. But it was an anomaly in more ways than one. To begin with, whereas the Met’s annual exhibition is traditionally staged in the Costume Institute’s dedicated galleries, Rei Kawakubo insisted on presenting hers in an alternate gallery – the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall – situated at the heart of the museum, a fact that as many commentators have emphasized connected her practice with art.1 Second, the exhibition was less a retrospective than a curated selection of Kawakubo’s preferred designs. That is, instead of presenting an even cross-section of her designs from her 1981 Paris début (or even earlier), the exhibition preferred to show more recent work. In fact, fully half the pieces in the show were produced in the three years prior to the exhibition.2 In the absence of an orthodox chronological or even historical retrospective model, the exhibition was arranged according to a series of nine themes, for example, ‘Model/Multiple’, ‘High/Low’ and ‘Fashion/Anti-Fashion’. Finally, it should perhaps be noted that, although Art of the In-Between was officially curated by Andrew Bolton, Head Curator of the Costume Institute, it was actually Kawakubo who selected and organized the clothes, all of which were presented on limbless white calico mannequins

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FIGURE 12.1   Exhibition map of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017.

with or without headpieces designed by Kawakubo’s long-time collaborator Julien d’Ys.3 In the end, the exhibition was less of a retrospective than, in the words of fashion writer Harriette Richards, ‘a complete Comme des Garçons “universe”’.4 But perhaps more notable and more commented upon than all of these points – or at least why they all come together – was the actual installation of the clothes for the exhibition not on the plinths or banquettes of the usual fashion show, but in a series of intertwined cubes, inverted cones, semicircles and triangles – a life-size model of which Kawakubo had originally built in her studio on the outskirts of Tokyo in order to visualize the final exhibition install. (See Figure 12.1.) Thus, we had the garments from Abstract Excellence (Spring/Summer 2004) that made up the ‘Model/Multiple’ theme put together in a narrow, cylindrical rotunda or the ensembles from Ballerina Motorbike (Spring/Summer 2005) that made up the ‘High/Low’ theme put together in a simplified house structure. (See Figure 12.2.) Of course, the first point to be considered is how these exterior forms might match the clothes within them, but then beyond that – and I suggest that it is something of the same order of classification – how the various headings under which Kawakubo organized

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FIGURE 12.2  The Model/Multiple section of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between comprised of skirts from Abstract Excellence, Spring/Summer 2004, The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017.

her career, which after all are not always the conventional categories usually applied to clothes, say something about the particular garments grouped under that heading. It is certainly something that puzzled a number of reviewers of and commentators on the show, and that was not always thought to be successful. Sarah C. Byrd, writing for the academic journal Textile History, remarked that the forms were a direct reference to Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market stores – Comme des Garçons’ take on the department store – which all include some form of often-white structural ‘intervention’. Byrd concluded with cynicism that the design of Art of the In-Between contributed to an overall sense that ‘the Met has graciously offered to provide a privileged space for a promotional event for Comme des Garçons’.5 Of course, the idea of Kawakubo taking over the organization of her retrospective and even that her clothes are peculiarly suited to this  –  are already in a way their own retrospective – sits well with the idea of Kawakubo as the quintessential ‘postmodern’ designer.6 It is the idea that the clothes continually play off, allude to, in a sense quote or even re-use, each other. Thus, as is commonly pointed out in the writing on Kawakubo, the designer ‘revisits and refines her archive’ – a later season’s oversized second and third set of sleeves attached to the shoulders of a suit jacket (MONSTER, Autumn/Winter

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2014–15) can be seen to be coming out of an earlier season’s addition of a suit jacket onto the front of a dress (Persona, Autumn/Winter 2006–7).7 And, most notably, a number of Kawakubo’s later seasons – for example, the collection Inside Decoration (Autumn/Winter 2010–11) can be seen to be coming out of or responding to her original famous ‘Lumps and Bumps’ dresses of Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body (Spring/Summer 1997). But if Kawakubo is the quintessential postmodern designer, I suggest that Art of the In-Between demonstrates it in a special way: in its series of eccentric classifications, it reveals that it is not simply a matter of quoting or even remarking itself, as though this were somehow a critical looking back as opposed to a modernist progressive activity. Rather, I suggest that what the exhibition reveals is that every garment in Kawakubo’s oeuvre implicitly contains all of the others, that some commonality can be found between any two pieces of clothing. It is often said that Kawakubo’s distinctive style was there from the start, and this is true, but this must be understood in the more than usual sense that great designers find their particular voice from the beginning.8 It is rather to say that Kawakubo has spent the rest of her career drawing out the potentials or implications of that ‘first’ garment, just as every garment after it is also original in that it shows us something about that first one and all of the others that came after it that had not been seen before. Which is also to say that, if Kawakubo’s fashion system is complete from the beginning, it is also permanently unfinished, with the implications of that first outfit unexhausted even by the last. In this chapter, I will begin by analysing in detail a number of the particular categories of Kawakubo’s Art of the In-Between and the particular dresses or garments grouped under them. I do this to show the distinct new style  –  but better the logic  –  that Kawakubo introduces into fashion: which is a kind of postmodernism, but also something much more generalized and disaggregated than that. I would even want to suggest that it is a precursor to something like the internet search engine, which trawls enormous amounts of data to draw out some particular feature. And I would want to say that, along with a new logic of fashion, Kawakubo also – at least implicitly – points to or at least is contemporary with a similar new practice in the display of museum art collections, which is no longer that of demonstrating a continuous innovation or avant-garde, but with each new show putting forward a particular subset or survey of the collection around some particular theme. And to conclude here I look briefly at a more recent exhibition of Kawakubo’s work, Collecting Comme, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2019, which similarly to the Met show sought to take seriously the implications of Kawakubo’s work for museological procedure, to think about why the conventional museum’s fashion retrospective model – that is, laying out each garment in progression, with each at once coming out of the one before and leaving it behind – is no longer possible after Kawakubo.

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The fashion of Art of the In-Between Art of the In-Between was divided up in all into nine themes or categories: ‘Absence/Presence’, ‘Design/Not Design’, ‘Fashion/Anti-Fashion’, ‘Model/ Multiple’, ‘High/Low’, ‘Then/Now’, ‘Self/Other’, ‘Object/Subject’ and ‘Clothes/ Not Clothes’. Undoubtedly it was an unusual set of categories into which to divide a museum fashion retrospective, if not in academic fashion discourse. There was not the usual designation of distinct fashion styles or periods or moments in Kawakubo’s career, nor any attempt to identify the links to and influences of other designers through wider style or fashion categories (for example, her use of nineteenth-century formal techniques, which might speak of her affinity to Jean Paul Gaultier; her use of tartan, which might speak of her connection to such designers as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen; or even the notion of an avant-garde Japanese aesthetic, which might speak of her relationship to such designers as Yohji Yamamoto, Kenzo or Issey Miyake).9 Instead of pointing either to some particular clothing style or period, the categories chosen refer to all of fashion as a system. They are not specific to Kawakubo’s clothing but to all clothing as such. Moreover – and this was perhaps the truly radical thing about the exhibition – although these antithetical paradigms or oppositions are undoubtedly ways of speaking about and classifying fashion, in fact the very point of Art of the In-Between, as indicated first of all by its title, was that it was precisely not a matter of choosing one half over the other, as though it was through some particular selection or combination of these that we might understand Kawakubo’s clothes. Rather the point was that Kawakubo’s clothes embody both halves of the opposition or at least render it impossible to choose between them. Thus, the point of the show was that the clothes were both fashion and anti-fashion, high and low and clothes and not clothes, for example.10 More than this, in the actual organization of the show even the specific categories – ‘Self/Other’, ‘Then/Now’ and ‘Object/Subject’ – were not discrete from each other, or at least the objects grouped under each can be seen themselves to manifest several distinct qualities that do not simply fit under a single heading. We can see this specifically in the ‘Self/Other’ category, which  –  like many others in the show  –  was divided up into three sub categories: ‘Male/Female’, ‘East/West’ and ‘Child/Adult’. (See Figure 12.3.) That is to say, the entire category ‘Self/Other’ was mounted in the show under three white structures, ‘Male/Female’, ‘East/West’ and ‘Child/Adult’, which each stood alone but also overlapped. ‘Male/Female’, for example, which included an oversized houndstooth shorts-suit from The Infinity of Tailoring (Autumn/Winter 2013–14), was displayed in a central rectangular structure in a more or less horizontal formation. But attached to this rectangular structure

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was  a long, wide ramp that extended from the ‘Male/Female’ section. This ramp housed the garments from the ‘East/West’ category  –  a category said to be defined by garments that combined both Asian and European influences.11 As a result, the two sections seemed to blend into one another, so that while the categories themselves were discrete the viewer could recognize Kawakubo’s propensity for recycling elements across conceptual borders. The three designs that operated as the ‘hinge’ between the two subsections were all tartan ensembles taken from Inside Decoration, a collection that played with proportion in the same way as Body Meets Dress did – by padding various sections of the garments. The formal affinity of these garments to the neighbouring The Infinity of Tailoring in the ‘Male/Female’ subcategory was also plain to see. The bulbous padded forms of these Inside Decoration outfits, particularly in the shoulders and torso  –  in combination with the drapery of the tartan shorts  –  manifested themselves three years later in the neighbouring The Infinity of Tailoring ensemble, where the same drapery was visible in the black woollen shorts and the tail of the woollen coat. Meanwhile the bulbousness of the padding in Body Meets Dress has become the bulbousness of the two sets of useless sleeves in the suit jacket of The Infinity of Tailoring.

FIGURE 12.3  The Self/Other section of Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between showing details of the two subcategories Male/Female (left) and East/West (right), Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017.

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A similar format was implemented in the category ‘Then/Now’, which was in turn divided into two subcategories, ‘Past/Present/Future’ and ‘Birth/ Marriage/Death’. Not unlike ‘Self/Other’, ‘Then/Now’ housed each subcategory in discrete but overlapping structures – a hollow semi-circle was connected to a small amphitheatre-shaped structure by a long, glass rectangular prism perched on top of them. ‘Birth/Marriage/Death’, housed in the semi-circle structure, included garments predominantly made from tulle in either white, cream or pink. This section included a white cotton poplin and polyester tulle dress matched with a cotton lace veil from the White Drama collection (Spring/ Summer 2012). The dress was composed of several tessellated, ruffled layers that ballooned voluminously out just above the knee. The veil, meanwhile, which had a rose pattern woven into it, draped over the face to meet the shoulders, creating a continuous A-line with the dress. This ensemble might very well have come out of the Autumn/Winter 1990–1 collection Modern Sweetness. One dress from Modern Sweetness, housed in the narrow ‘Past/ Present/Future’ bridge that sat atop ‘Birth/Marriage/Death’, used almost identical draping as the previously discussed White Drama dress. The dress, made from white polyester wadding, was also composed of many layers with triangular edges (as though a hole were simply cut out of a square for the waist) that were also tessellated, allowing each layer to be seen by the viewer. Thus, we might conclude that Kawakubo’s production of the White Drama dress, some twelve years later, recalled the simultaneous use of visible, petal-like layering and volume creation that she had already worked with in Modern Sweetness. The logic of repetition embodied by ‘Then/Now’, in which the viewer could plainly see the repetition of style from one subcategory to the other, repeated also the logic of the ‘Self/Other’ category where later collections were presented as recategorizations of earlier ones. One of the things that is apparent in Kawakubo’s clothes, as brought out by the installation at the Met, was just how often the same garments crossed the various categories that Kawakubo or Bolton set up for it: we have not only White Drama across ‘Birth/Marriage/Death’ and ‘Past/Present/Future’ in the ‘Then/Now’ category, but also Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body across the three categories ‘Absence/Presence’, ‘Then/Now’ and ‘Object/Subject’, and 2 Dimensions (Autumn/Winter 2012–13) across ‘Child/Adult’ in ‘Self/ Other’ and ‘Absence/Presence’. Indeed, we might suggest that Kawakubo deliberately set out this complex and unconventional taxonomy of her clothes precisely to show that they could not be contained within it. In fact, I would ultimately want to go on to suggest that not only do we have on several occasions one of Kawakubo’s collections across two or more of the categories or subcategories that she proposed but also – in what can appear to be the inverse – two different seasons of clothes in the same category conforming to a type of cross-indexing according to purely formal qualities.

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The exhibition itself began with a tall, cylindrical structure – a steel frame covered in marine ply and painted white – that visitors had to walk past as they entered the show. It contained four completely red outfits from three different collections: Body Meets Dress, 2 Dimensions and Invisible Clothes (Spring/ Summer 2017). (See Plate 13 in colour insert.) Again, we have a seemingly eccentric principle of classification, the colour red, but I suggest that this is only to point us to the way that Kawakubo is constantly recycling the same ‘formal’ elements from season to season: not just obviously the various reworkings of the sewn inserts of Body Meets Dress (that are presented again later in Inside Decoration), but to take just one more example the exaggerated interplay between volume and cinching in the garments that were housed in the sub category of ‘Fact/Fiction’, part of the ‘Clothes/Not Clothes’ category. Outfits from three collections  –  Blue Witch (Spring/Summer 2016), Lilith (Autumn/ Winter 1992–3) and Dark Romance, Witch (Autumn/Winter 2004–5) – made up this category and were united by a common upending of traditional (feminine) silhouettes for tiering and segmentation. Thus, one outfit from Blue Witch – a vertically pleated, tubular dress of black polyester and faux fur – was segmented around the chest and hips with polyester feathers that stuck out, creating an unnatural juxtaposition between length and width. Much of the Dark Romance, Witch collection was comprised of pieces that corresponded to a similar play with form, using ruffles, draping and feathers to achieve this. But Kawakubo also included two ensembles from Dark Romance, Witch (a collection that was decidedly more reserved than Blue Witch) in the ‘Fact/ Fiction’ category that was fitted into the taxonomy of the aforementioned Blue Witch dress. One ensemble, made up of a black cupra silk-satin jacket and wool silk-satin and muslin skirt, was also comprised of segmentation achieved, this time, through ruching. The main feature of the jacket, for example, was a set of faux sleeves that were gathered tightly to create stiff ridging and causing them to stand up in a sculptural manner. In other words, I suggest that what Art of the In-Between sought to make clear is Kawakubo’s profoundly anti-modernist conception of clothing design: that even though the various categories that Kawakubo was classified under were not the orthodox ones of successive styles or seasons, the fact that we nevertheless find the same season under (or perhaps between) two distinct categories or the same stylistic device repeated across seasons often separated by several years indicates that her designs are not about constant innovation and updating, the often-stated logic and reason of fashion. Instead, the same element recurs or the same element is used in different ways in different seasons. And this alternate principle is of course recognized in many of the writings on Kawakubo. To take just one instance here, Matthew Schneier, writing for the New York Times, points out that part of the polemic and importance of Kawakubo is the way that she refuses to innovate for

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the sake of the market, that she does not simply leave the past behind as literally outmoded or outdated as so much fashion does.12 Instead, she has developed a number of more commercially viable lines  –  Play, wallets and fragrances – that allow her to remain ‘esoteric’ with her Comme des Garçons mainline.13 That, in fact – in a fairly common designation – Kawakubo is the definitive ‘postmodern’ designer, as pointed out by Lise Skov: Comme des Garçons garments have rarely carried any overt allusions to either a particular culture or a specific historical situation. Kawakubo has tended to empty her clothes of any recognisable connotations. Instead, as an evasive strategy, she produces minimalist designs, repeating simple themes which themselves do not have any meaning.14 But I perhaps mean more than this: not only that Kawakubo periodically remakes or revisits previous clothes as inspiration, but that the logic of her work is that each garment implicitly contains all of the others. That each subsequent dress – and this is why the same dress can fall under different heads – seeks to draw out what is implicit from the beginning. Which is to say, as is also commonly said, that Kawakubo’s fashion is complete from her very first work and, what is less commonly said, it is also never finished, she will never complete the task of drawing out all of the implications of what was there from the beginning. In this sense, I might say that for such an ‘influential’ designer, it is very hard to say just what it is that Kawakubo leaves behind for those who follow. It is not any kind of an identifiable and imitable style or design or even technique, as with other ‘great’ designers – the tweed suit set with Chanel, the one-seam coat with Balenciaga, corsetry with Thierry Mugler. Rather, it is the ongoing destruction or – if this is not the right word – even generalization of fashion. The point of Kawakubo’s work is that each element of it is capable of infinite expansion, infinite explanation. But it is not a matter of any kind of stylistic development or progression, as in modernism, but a kind of starting again from the beginning each time. Perhaps the designer after Kawakubo who best understands this is Martin Margiela. Margiela, of course is best known for his series of lining-dresses, in which he takes his previous season’s garments and undoes them and puts them together again in different formations and combinations. An example of this is the Fall 1997 collection in which Margiela produced new versions of the previous season’s – Spring 1997 – dressmaker form tops. Or there is the example of Margiela’s Spring 1999 collection that was based entirely upon garments from the previous decade’s back catalogue, which was described as the ‘greatest hits collection’.15 Here, for example, Margiela reproduced the trompe l’oeil pattern seen in the Spring 1996 collection, or – again – the stockman’s tops printed with ‘semi-couture’

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that were originally produced for Fall 1997 and then repurposed for Spring 1997. But the point is, beyond the seemingly anti-fashion destruction of his previous season’s work, the implication with these two examples is that individual elements of previous seasons are able to be combined in principle in infinitely many different ways to bring out different aspects. It is not so much the ‘extension’ or ‘development’ of the previous seasons’ fashion because there is no obvious progression (for the next season can be ‘deconstructed’ in the same way), and implicitly again it is all there from the beginning.

The art of Art of the In-Between It has often been noted that Kawakubo’s decision to place her exhibition in the Cantor Exhibition Hall rather than the Costume Institute’s dedicated galleries, where the annual fashion exhibition is usually staged, was a conscious decision to align her work with art as much as fashion. As fashion curator and lecturer at London College of Fashion Jeffrey Horsley noted, for instance, ‘The Cantor gallery is also often used for art exhibitions – so the space reflects the word “art” in the exhibition’s title.’16 And, in fact, the fashion exhibition, and particularly those at the Met – arguably the most important exhibiting space for fashion in the world  –  is in a complex relation to art. Perhaps the most relevant comparison to Art of the In-Between is the Costume Institute’s 1983 presentation of Twenty-Five Years of Yves St Laurent, the last retrospective given over to a living designer before Kawakubo. The show was in fact widely criticized for operating like a large ad campaign for the label and hence working towards Saint Laurent’s financial gain.17 (As well the show was widely criticized for the seen-to-be overly close ties between Saint Laurent and the show’s curator, Costume Institute Special Consultant Diana Vreeland.) This is in contrast with the Costume Institute’s monographic exhibitions dedicated to deceased designers, which have rarely garnered such criticism. A good example of this was the Met’s 1973 presentation The World of Balenciaga, about which Ruth Berenson, writing for The National Review, stated that the exhibition ‘accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of bridging the gap between art and fashion’.18 It was perhaps for these reasons that both Kawakubo and more particularly the Costume Institute were happy to align Kawakubo’s work with art, which was understood to take it away from these accusations and towards the apparently non-commercial realm of art. But perhaps the real point here is that the Kawakubo show did not merely draw on the pre-existing meanings of art but also helped us think what art is today. The most obvious comparison of Art of the In-Between with the museumstyle presentation of art lay only a short distance downtown in New York with

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the Museum of Modern Art. Under the long-running directorship of Alfred H. Barr, MoMA was largely responsible for the popularization  –  if not the creation – of the narrative of modern art. In his famous ‘corridor’ hang of the Museum’s collection, Barr set out modernism beginning ‘circa 1880’ (a fact that, as has been noted, breaks with the general acceptance that modernism began even earlier than that) with such artists as Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne and ending with the American abstraction of the 1950s; we might remember that for Barr ‘modernism’ included the contemporary moment and so went up to his own present day.19 As the critic and art historian Hal Foster points out, ‘Work in progress’ – i.e., continuity – was the defining framework through which MoMA sought to display its work.20 This was evident also in Barr’s creation of curatorial departments based on distinct mediums – painting, photography, design and so on – the idea for which he got from the Bauhaus and its notion of the utopian Gesamtkunstwerke or art-economic union.21 Not only was Barr interested in historical continuity  –  i.e., that the exhibition of works should progress from the oldest to the newest – but he also felt that this history should be twinned with formal consistency. But the curatorial argument of Art of the In-Between did not so much recall the hang of the old MoMA and the classic story of twentieth-century modernism as predict the hang of the new MoMA and a new twenty-first-century ‘altmodernism’. In fact, in 2019, two years after Art of the In-Between, the new MoMA opened. In his response to this, Foster remarks that three significant changes were embodied in the new hang and museum space. First, it allowed curators to work across the boundaries of the traditional medium-specific departments. Second, curators were now able to ‘complicate’ the traditionally singular narrative of modernism to include a greater variety of voices (racial, national, gender). Third, the increase in space – the new MoMA was some 30 per cent bigger than the old – allowed curators to create dialogue between modern and contemporary art across open spaces and no longer install the work in a narrow, corridor-like hang. Foster sums up the new MoMA model in the following terms: ‘The current presentation plays with two great banes of traditional art history: anachronism, the confusion of works from different periods, and pseudomorphism, the assumption that lookalikes are alike in other ways too (this is the visual version of faux amis across languages)’.22 The parallels between Foster’s description of the new MoMA and Art of the In-Between, with its deliberate production of anachronism and groupings of garments according to pseudomorphism, are almost too perfect. And, as I say, some two years before the opening of the new MoMA, Kawakubo was already exploring these ideas in Art of the In-Between. In the ‘Past/Present/Future’ subcategory of the section ‘Then/Now’, there are two outfits from Kawakubo’s Sweeter than Sweet (Autumn/Winter 1995–6) series in baby pink and white that are each made up of an acrylic knitted sweater and

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a nylon chiffon skirt that had an enormous bustle, which picks up the vestigial sleeves seen in The Infinity of Tailoring subsection of the ‘Self/Other’ section that sat adjacent to ‘Then/Now’. And housed in this same structure with these cartoonish bustled skirts was an ensemble of white crocheted tops and full tulle skirts adorned with cascades of white flowers from Kawakubo’s White Drama (Spring/Summer 2012) season. The combination of crochet top and ultra-feminine nineteenth-century skirt was anachronistic, at once combining 1960s hippy and Victorian looks. The apparent formal dialogue across works in different sections here  –  the white nylon chiffon in Sweeter than Sweet and the full tulle skirt of White Drama – can be explained by no meaningful historical continuity or even narrative of stylistic development. And, insofar as it is both Kawakubo herself and her fashion design that is the real author and model for the hang, it is perhaps not too much to see Comme des Garçons as one of the founding models for the new museology in which fashion, art and design cross over and chronology (even an inverted revisionist history) is superseded by a thematic based on formal connections and coincidences. Indeed, more than this, I suggest that Art of the In-Between captures something very profound about Kawakubo that even goes beyond such things as the new MoMA hang. And that is the fact that Kawakubo’s fashion sets out an autonomous, self-enclosed and almost solipsistic system. In Vreeland’s Saint Laurent show, for instance, a classic ‘modernist’ exhibition, there was an indication both of what Saint Laurent came out of  –  the show included a green woollen suit that he made during his time at Dior, to indicate the early training in tailoring passed on to him  –  and a suggestion of those he influenced.23 By contrast, there was none of this in Art of the In-Between, with the only reference to anything outside of Kawakubo’s clothes being a video of a Merce Cunningham performance Scenario (1997), in which the performers wore garments from Body Meets Dress.24 Nor was there any reference to Comme des Garçons’ various offshoot lines, including Comme des Garçons’ Girl, Tricot, Shirt or Homme Plus (in fact, the exhibition included no menswear) or the collaborations with Converse or Nike. In other words, it was the purest version of Kawakubo’s world that constantly referenced itself. In this regard, we might contrast Art of the In-Between with a more recent exhibition of Kawakubo’s clothing, Collecting Comme, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2019. (See Figure 12.4.) Largely based on pieces donated to the gallery by Takamasa Takahashi, the show differed from Art of the In-Between in first of all including the work of Kawakubo’s ‘disciples’ Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihari at the end of the exhibition. Even if their labels are technically part of the Comme label, their inclusion introduced a certain difference into the exhibition, the idea that not everything was already to be found in that original Pirates show in 1981 – Kawakubo’s legendary Paris debut. Second, unlike the single clip of Cunningham’s ballet in In-Between,

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FIGURE 12.4   Installation shot of Collecting Comme at the National Gallery of Victoria, 31 October 2019 to 26 July 2020. in Collecting Comme there were whole sequences of footage from various runway shows shown throughout the exhibition, indicating that the public presence, if not the creation of the brand, was not the result of a single mistress but in fact the product of many hired hands, complicating Kawakubo’s legacy. And, finally, and perhaps most significantly, the design for the exhibition was maximalist compared to Art of the In-Between. To begin with  –  in contrast to the limbless, calico mannequins of the Met show  –  the garments in Collecting Comme were displayed on anthropomorphized mannequins with facial features and limbs  –  such as those seen in department stores  –  and were dressed with shoes, many of which were not Comme des Garçons’. In addition, the exhibition design mimicked a ‘grunge’ aesthetic that included raw timber panels adorned with Xs made out of duct tape and partially painted backdrops, all of which emphasized Kawakubo’s supposed improvization and lack of finish. By contrast, Art of the In-Between represented Comme des Garçons as a brand that was from the beginning completely formed. Through its various categories, which nevertheless slide into each other, it showed the way that the ‘same’ underlying formal qualities have been reformulated again and again to create new collections that nevertheless embody the same underlying elements that were present in the inaugural 1981 show. It was Art of the InBetween, perhaps even against the implications of its own name, that best put forward the endlessly interconnected, intra-referential and ahistorical iteration that creates the sense of completeness in the Comme des Garçons

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universe. And in a way it insisted not only upon the spectator’s full immersion but also their complete agreement with what they were looking at. This was perhaps best embodied in the show by the section ‘Model/ Multiple’, which was comprised of a single exhibition of six skirts from Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2004 collection, Abstract Excellence. In it six near-identical skirts were presented, tightly housed in a slender cylindrical form with just one door-sized opening that allowed the spectator to see the entire collection of garments at once. And due to the size of the opening and the small internal volume of the space in which they were housed, viewers were essentially required to experience the installation one at a time. This individual experience undoubtedly heightened the sense of immersion – one had to angle one’s body and neck in order to see the entire installation. This was a microcosm within the larger Kawakubo ‘universe’ that was Art of the InBetween. Meanwhile, each of the skirts in the ‘Model/Multiple’ presentation had the same basic make-up  –  white or pink cotton twill with a black interfacing  –  with slight changes, such as the positioning of the seam, and were all ‘variations of a single form’.25 Here, the viewer was presented with the absolute material minutiae out of which Kawakubo has built her practice. It is the production of the ‘new’ by continually reclassifying and recounting the same basic building blocks that she has always worked with.

Notes 1 Amy de la Haye and Jeffrey Horsley, ‘Rei Kawakubo. Comme Des Garçons. Art of the In-Between’, Fashion Theory 24(1), 2018, p. 125. 2 Roberta Smith, ‘The Met’s Rei Kawakubo Show, Dressed for Defiance’, New York Times, 4 May 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/arts/ design/the-mets-rei-kawakubo-show-dressed-for-defiance.html) accessed 20 December 2021. 3 For more on d’Y’s contribution to Art of the In-Between, see Laird BorrelliPersson, ‘Hairy, Not Scary: An Exclusive Look at Julien d’Ys’s Met Prep, Photographed by Ilker Akyol’, Vogue, 2 May 2017 (https://www.vogue.com/ article/julien-dys-ilker-akyol-comme-des-garcons-rei-kawakubo) accessed 4 January 2022. 4 Harriette Richards, ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons: Art of the InBetween’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 5(3), October 2018, pp. 397–404. 5 Sarah C. Byrd, ‘Rei Kawakubo / Comme Des Garçons: Art of the InBetween’, Textile History 49(1), May 2018, p. 126. Byrd also argues that the shadowless overhead lighting, designed by Kawakubo’s long-time collaborator Thierry Dreyfus, contributed too to this feeling of being in the retail stores: ‘The lighting provided a stark contrast to the familiar low levels found in museums, giving off a cold and detached quality like that of an art gallery. Or, more accurately, a retail environment like Dover Street Market,

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the shops created by Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe where an assortment of merchandise is spread out in meandering displays and lit with similar fluorescent installations’ (p. 122). 6 Patricia Mears, ‘Formalism and Revolution: Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’, in Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, Yuniya Kawamura and Hiroshi Narumi, Japan Fashion Now, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2010, p. 157. 7 Karen de Perthius, ‘Breaking the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s Fashion Manifesto’, Fashion Theory 7, January 2019, p. 13. 8 Speaking of The Art of the In-Between, journalist Alexander Fury discussed seven key themes that have been present in Kawakubo’s work since her 1981 Pirates debut at Paris Fashion week. See Alexander Fury, ‘7 Key Themes in Rei Kawakubo’s Career’, New York Times, 28 April 2017, sec. T Magazine (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/t-magazine/fashion/reikawakubo-comme-des-garcons-themes.html) accessed 20 December 2021. 9 Yuniya Kawamura, ‘Type 2: Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Yohji Yamamoto: Construction of the Japanese Avant-Garde Fashion’, in The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Dress, Body, Culture), Berg, London, 2004, pp. 125–50. 10 Interestingly, two commentators – Amy de la Hay and Otto von Busch – viewed the Met’s insistence on binaries as somewhat problematic. Amy de la Haye stated, for example, ‘I was a bit surprised that the identified themes conveyed polar opposites rather than convergence’, suggesting that each capsule featured an either/or logic. Meanwhile, Otto von Busch wrote ‘The western focus on dualities, highlighted by the Met guide, becomes especially apparent in another common analytical concept of fashion: the idea of fetishism.’ See de la Haye and Horsley, ‘Rei Kawakubo. Comme Des Garçons. Art of the In-Between’, n. 1, p. 128. Otto von Busch, ‘Beyond the In-between: Rei Kawakubo at The Met and the Clash between Eastern and Western Concepts in Fashion Studies’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 5(1), April 2018, p. 117. 11 ‘Exhibition Brochure for Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons: Art of the InBetween’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017. 12 Matthew Schneier, ‘Rei Kawakubo, the Nearly Silent Oracle of Fashion’, The New York Times, 1 May 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/fashion/ rei-kawakubos-commes-de-garcons.html) accessed 4 January 2022. 13 Schneier, ‘Rei Kawakubo, the Nearly Silent Oracle of Fashion’, n. 12. 14 Lise Skov, ‘Fashion Trends, Japonisme and Postmodernism: Or “What Is so Japanese about Comme des Garçons?”’, Theory, Culture & Society 13(3), August 1996, p. 142. 15 Laird Borrelli-Persson, ‘Maison Margiela Spring 1999 Ready-to-Wear Collection’, Vogue, 2 October 1998 (https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-1999ready-to-wear/maison-martin-margiela) accessed 20 December 2021. 16 de la Haye and Horsley, ‘Rei Kawakubo. Comme Des Garçons. Art of the In-Between’, n. 1, p. 125. 17 N.J. Stevenson, ‘The Fashion Retrospective’, Fashion Theory 12(2), June 2008, p. 224.

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18 Ruth Berenson, ‘Balenciaga at the Met’, National Review, 31 August 1973, p. 949. 19 Hal Foster, ‘Museum Tales of Twentieth-Century Art’, Studies in the History of Art 74, 2009, p. 354. 20 Hal Foster, ‘Change at MoMA’, London Review of Books, 11 July 2019 (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n21/hal-foster/change-at-moma) accessed 15 January 2022. 21 Ralph Alexander Smith, ‘MoMA as Educator: The Legacy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39(2), Summer 2005, p. 100. 22 Foster, ‘Change at MoMA’, n. 20. 23 Martha Duffy, ‘Living: Toasting Saint Laurent’, Time (Time, Inc., 1983). 24 In 2019, Kawakubo also collaborated with the Wiener Staatsoper for its production of Orlando composed by Olga Neuwirth. Kawakubo has stated that she did not have time to create entirely new costumes specifically for the show and that she, therefore, themed the two preceding Comme des Garçons collections Orlando, reusing many of the designs from the production: ‘Some patterns I necessarily reused and reconceived from the archives, although everything had totally new fabrics’, stated Kawakubo, once again speaking to the fact that she constantly recategorizes old styles – even in the case of the special opera commission. For more see Vanessa Friedman, ‘Rei Kawakubo Talks “Orlando”, Opera and the Performance of Gender’, The New York Times, 8 December 2019, sec. Style (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/style/rei-kawakubo-orlando-viennaopera.html) accessed 5 December 2021. 25 ‘Exhibition Brochure for Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’, n. 11.

13 Rei Kawakubo: Fashion degree zero Rex Butler

For all of her undoubted importance, fashion writers have found it difficult to come to terms with Rei Kawakubo. The usual aesthetic qualities and historical comparisons by which we might describe her work appear somehow inappropriate. Even describing how her clothes are made appears beside the point, insofar as this is not marked by any particular virtuosity or distinctiveness. And something of this withdrawal is seen in Kawakubo’s own relationship to her clothes and promotion of her label. Kawakubo does not put herself out personally in front of her clothes like so many other designers. She does not take a bow with the models after her shows or sell her own self-image as part of the brand, like Yves Saint Laurent in the past or Giorgio Armani in the present. Rather – and there is undoubtedly an element of racial stereotyping in this – she is invariably described as ‘wilfully elusive’, ‘intensely private’ and ‘uncompromisingly severe’ by commentators. Here, for example, is Claire Wilcox describing her and fellow Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto: ‘Kawakubo and Yamamoto are fashion’s reclusives, rarely making public appearances or conducting interviews.’1 Then there is the manner in which her clothes are presented, not just on the runway but in her shops. Here too there is a certain perceived lack of hype and self-promotion, with no attempt to create a recognizable image with which the public can identify. This is retail analyst Celia Freiling describing the apparently ordinary and everyday experience of shopping at Comme’s Dover Street Market in London: ‘Dover Street Market is a department store where art and fashion meet, a gallery that invites one to interact. Exclusivity becomes approachable. A beautiful chaos is pieced together by a curated selection of fashion brands.’2

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Finally, there are the clothes themselves. In this regard as well there is a sensed difficulty in describing what they mean or what drives Kawakubo to make them. To begin with Kawakubo herself, she is quite emphatic in her refusal to explain them biographically, either in terms of her femininity or her Japaneseness. But beyond this she is even against the whole idea of explaining fashion, and especially her fashion, at all. As she says to fashion journalist Terry Jones in one of her rare interviews: ‘You don’t have to talk to me, look at the clothes and then you see.’3 When her clothes were presented in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Detroit in 2008, instead of the usual didactics on the wall elaborating them, Kawakubo insisted on wall signage consisting of such aphorisms as ‘I wouldn’t explain my creative processes to you. And even if I could, why would I?’ And, perhaps most famously, when Kawakubo had her 2017 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, notionally the highlight of any fashion designer’s career, and for which most would do anything, it seems she refused to have a long essay written about her work in the catalogue and organized her clothes into a series of oppositional categories that at first sight had little to do with fashion, for example, ‘Then/Now’, ‘Self/Other’ and ‘Absence/Presence’. But more than any of these external reasons, there is something about the clothes themselves that appears difficult to talk about or to refuse meaning. The usual logics of fashion as either the classical following of conventions to produce something of recognizable beauty (arguably, the logic of such prewar designers as Madeleine Vionnet and Jeanne Lanvin) or the modernist breaking of rules that is retrospectively recognized (arguably, the logic of such post-war designers as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin) do not appear in any obvious sense to apply to Kawakubo. Let us take, for example, the use of the colour black in her clothes, which is so much part of her identity and which she has been said to have ‘invented’ in fashion. Of course, early in the twentieth century, such designers as Dior, Coco Chanel and Christóbal Balenciaga introduced black into women’s clothing. This was not any kind of polemical gesture but rather an attempt to take the unquestioned status and authority of the man’s evening suit and confer it on women’s attire. And following this the black dress is not any kind of fashion but rather is that unchanging background against which the items of ‘fashion’ – belts, buttons, brooches and shoes – are rendered visible. Then at a certain point, let us call it the moment of punk, black is no longer the unquestioned background against which other elements are seen but is itself selected for its own particular qualities. Even though it is the same black, it is now distinguished, remarked, we might say ‘fashionable’. It is not automatic but willed. It is no longer chosen for women but chosen by them in an act of self-empowerment. As Elizabeth Wilson puts it in Adorned in Dreams: ‘What was important [about punk] is that nothing should look natural.

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In this sense, punk was the opposite of mainstream, which always attempts to naturalise the strange rather than the other way about.’4 As is well known, Kawakubo and her partner at the time Yohji Yamamoto were big fans of punk when it broke in London in the mid-1970s and often shopped at Vivienne Westwood’s Sex boutique in Chelsea. But for all of that, in the designs they started making soon after, the logic of their clothes was profoundly different. To begin with, if punk was about the breaking of the rules of fashion by taking what was usually the background of fashion and making it the subject of fashion (not just black, but also zippers and safety pins), by the time they encountered it punk was the new fashion. It had itself followed that modernist logic of turning the breaking of rules into the new rules. This is why Kawakubo never simply speaks of her work as any kind of anti-fashion. However, more than this, she profoundly grasps that the true lesson of punk is that it is no longer a matter of searching for a new style or fashion, or rather the anti-style or anti-fashion it first appears as, because it will inevitably turn back into fashion. In this sense, we might even suggest that punk was the last possible fashion. After it, any new anti-fashion must necessarily be conscious that it will turn back into fashion. Indeed, it could not even be recognized as anti-fashion unless it has already turned back into fashion. And what we want to suggest here is that this situation is the very subject of Kawakubo’s fashion. At once it is no longer possible either to repeat the rules of fashion, as in classicism, or to break definitively with them, as with modernism. And thus, we might say, the black in her work is neither background nor foreground but impossibly both, split or divided from itself. We might see this another way in Kawakubo’s work. Another aspect of punk was the combining of elements that were not usually seen to go together. This was to be found in such well-known ensembles as Westwood’s 1973 houndstooth stretch lycra pants paired with a bra made out of mohair and diamante straps and her 1974 costume for Ken Russell’s film Mahler, for which she made a dominatrix leather suit with appliquéd crotch-top Christ and swastika made of glitter. And punk’s use of zippers and safety pins, as well as bringing what was previously marginal centre stage, was also a way of emphasizing the arbitrariness of these connections, the join or seam between such disparate materials. And in many ways Kawakubo follows this logic. Of course, most obviously there is the creation of down-filled inner spaces in the original Bump dresses of Body Meets Dress  –  Dress Meets Body (Spring/ Summer 1997), which produces an arbitrariness of profile that does not at all match the silhouette of the wearer’s body. And this gap or discrepancy between body and dress has been followed up in such later collections as Inside Decoration (Spring/Summer 2010–11), in which the dresses had removable pillows, and MONSTER (Autumn/Winter 2014–15), in which they were fitted with internal tubular appendages. But perhaps more obviously, in

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Kawakubo’s Holes collection (Autumn/Winter 1982–3), black woollen sweaters were randomly pierced with holes, sleeves were not of the same length and the garments were visibly seamed at the sides, shoulders and asymmetrically across the front and back. In her notorious Patchworks and X show (Spring/ Summer 1983), skirts had jacket sleeves hanging from their fronts, trousers had sweater cuffs attached around their ankles and jackets were buttoned back to front. And, finally, in terms of the mismatch not of design elements but of materials, we might think of the aptly titled Cubisme show (Spring/Summer 2007), where there were double-layered jackets assembled out of random squares of crepe and satin and tartan shorts and trousers were hidden under an outer layer of beige tulle, and Cacophony (Spring/Summer 2008), which featured tutus with African-style print inserts, gingham fabrics patched onto trench coats and skirts with knotted rags tied to their hems. (See Figure 13.1.)

FIGURE 13.1   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Cacophony collection, Spring/ Summer 2008, Paris Fashion Week, 2 October 2007.

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But again here, for all of the apparent imitation of punk transgression, something is subtly different. In a self-contradictory manner, punk wants to be recognized for its rule-breaking as though these rules still exist. Indeed, punk does not intend entirely to get rid of the rules of fashion but simply to challenge them. And, in fact – this is ultimately the same thing – punk desires to become the new rule. Its new combinations of elements and materials aspire to be recognized in their own right as establishing a new taste to be followed. In a kind of reverse temporality – but this is what punk shows us about fashion in general  –  what was once out of fashion becomes the new fashion, and it is only by first being out of fashion that it can become fashion. However, what we want to suggest is that Kawakubo in her practice somehow seeks to ‘suspend’ this logic or transition. In her combinations of elements and materials she wishes to be neither anti-fashion nor fashion but to capture the moment of undecidability between the two. It is a kind of neutrality or indifference, in which we see her clothes neither explicitly break the rules nor evidence a particular new way of putting elements and materials together. And it is this that at once makes it difficult to write about her work and the better writers on her recognize as the real challenge of writing about it. Here, for example, is Leonard Koren speaking of the way that her clothing is somehow mute and unrhetorical, does not obviously manifest a novel and distinctive sensibility in the way fashion designers are meant to: ‘Kawakubo has created fashion that is cool and austere at first glance. Her fabrics are generally undecorated on the surface, an aspect of fundamental iconoclasm that works against the Western notion that plenitude and beauty are the same thing.’5 And here in an even more self-reflexive way is António Machuco Rosa speaking about the way that it is this modernist logic of fashion, in which what is originally unfashionable becomes the new fashion, that Kawakubo’s work is about and somehow seeks to circumvent: ‘The Comme des Garçons success attests that the principle of differentiation identified by Simmel is still a dominant force in fashion. It is a form of extreme negative imitation opposed to traditional ostentatious couture, but also opposed to ostentatious non-ostentatious trends.’6 In this chapter, we seek to identify this particular element of Kawakubo’s clothing. And what we want to suggest is that her true importance is not that she introduces a new style or movement into fashion, but that she addresses the logic of fashion itself. That is to say, Kawakubo does not simply make fashion but makes fashion about fashion. In this regard, she could even be understood to bring an end to fashion, but an end in the sense not of breaking with fashion, because fashion is always this, but of the suspension of fashion, a place where the rules of either fashion or anti-fashion no longer or do not yet apply. Undoubtedly, there is in this something utopian or impossible, but it is something Kawakubo aspires to. And although it would not be a matter

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of explaining this historically or stylistically, we might nevertheless point to certain parallels in architecture and the visual arts. For, indeed, like so many others, we would contend that Kawakubo is not merely a decisive designer but a decisive cultural figure altogether of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If it is not she alone who ushers in this new ‘sensibility’ or better ‘logic’ into culture, she is undoubtedly one of those figures through whom we might most clearly recognize it. In fact, a not inconsiderable number of writers on fashion have already acknowledged that it is not merely in terms of fashion that Kawakubo’s work must be thought. All we might do here is systematize and generalize their insights at the end of this collection, in preparation for further work to be done. *** In an attempt to specify the particularity of Kawakubo’s practice, paradoxically the comparison with architecture is often made. It would be not merely because of the ‘architectural’ quality of her clothing or the obvious attention paid to the ‘architecture’ of her retail outlets, as though we could straightforwardly say what architecture is. Beyond this, in the more ambitious writing on her, a more directed comparison is made between her work and certain trends in contemporary architecture, in which neither resembles architecture as conventionally understood. To take just one instance, Sylvia Lavin writes in ‘Pas Comme des Architectes: On Being Rei Kawakubo’: ‘When in the late 1960s Rei Kawakubo started making clothes, sculpture was becoming like advertising, and so on. One of the most ecstatic of these interminglings was that between architecture and clothing.’7 But, again, what could this mean? How might a certain contemporary architecture allow us to think the logic we see in Kawakubo’s fashion, or to put it another way how might Kawakubo’s fashion allow us to discern a certain logic in contemporary architecture? In other words, beyond any kind of formal comparison, how might a certain thinking of architecture be implied in the thinking of Kawakubo’s clothes? It is at this point that we might turn not to any particular piece of architecture but to the architectural discourse of Charles Jencks. Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) is often regarded as one of the first English-language introductions of the word ‘postmodern’ into cultural analysis. Notably, this implies, as with Kawakubo’s use of black, a break made with the modernist logic of stylistic innovation. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture argues that, within the field of architecture at least, the endless run of new styles has come to an end and instead architects now largely quote or replay previous styles. Undoubtedly, one of Jencks’ most telling examples of this is Robert Venturi’s Oberlin College Addition (1973–7), which puts together a high-school gym with a neo-Renaissance building to

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produce something deliberately ‘discordant and calculatedly ham-fisted’.8 But more than this cultural or historical situation where architectural innovation comes to an end, Jencks is interested in the logic of innovation, how it is that modernism in breaking the rules has to signify its innovation. Its innovations are not simply outside of all meaning but rather are constituted by the selection of one of two alternatives that it also makes visible. Modernist novelty is not simply outside of the code, but is rather a choice within the code that has not previously been made. As Jencks writes: ‘From metaphor to cliché, from neologism through constant usage to architectural sign, this is the continual route travelled by new and successful forms and techniques.’9 In other words, modernist innovation eventually and even at the time it occurs has to signify within the system it is notionally opposing. There is no outside to signification, but everything is already there in advance in order to create the language in which the architect works. However, it is only in his later Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture (1993) that Jencks truly gets close to the logic in Kawakubo that we are trying to identify. The book is explicitly written in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots that reduced much of South Central Los Angeles to rubble. And Jencks takes this rubble with its literal collapse of the usual architectural categories (high/low, inside/outside, ornament/ sculpture) as an emblem of the architecture that characterizes contemporary Los Angeles. He looks at a series of well-known pieces of architecture from the city  –  Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica Place (1979–80), Eric Owen Moss’

FIGURE 13.2   Frank Gehry, Santa Monica Place, Los Angeles, 1980.

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FIGURE 13.3   Morphosis Studio, Angeli Restaurant, 7274 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, 1984. 708 House (1981) and Morphosis’ Angeli’s Restaurant (1985) – to reveal how they deliberately put together categories that are normally kept apart. (See Figures 13.2 and 13.3.) For example, in Gehry’s Santa Monica Place a chainlink-wrapped parking lot holds contrasting architectural styles together and in Morphosis’ Angeli’s Restaurant metal support-beams run across the ceiling of a restaurant otherwise ornamented by rustic wooden slats. In one sense, this could be understood as that popularizing of high modernist taste typical of postmodernism. But, as we say, inspired by the ruins of downtown LA, Jencks sees it not as any simple transgression or even broadening of categories, but as a kind of flattening of them. What characterizes a building like Gehry’s

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Santa Monica Place is a simple indifference in which anything can go with anything. This is Jencks on this aspect of Gehry’s practice: ‘The oxymorons are perhaps the supreme expression of the heterogenous background, suggesting that such a distinctive approach could only have grown in a city which quite naturally tolerates difference, inconsistency and contradiction.’10 And it is this ‘en-formality’ that is the subject of his book: a kind of post-future architecture that to the extent possible avoids any discernible style. In this sense, like that ‘suspension’ we spoke of with regard to Kawakubo, Jencks would be not so much pointing to a new style as to the conditions for the emergence of any new style, almost like a ghost or spirit rising out of the rubble of the riots. *** We see the same thing in the visual arts as well. With the end of postmodernism, which was still after all something of a style, an attempt to unify all that came before under the category of the copy or appropriation, there might be posited a true breakdown of style, a mere putting together of objects beyond all available art-historical categories. Precisely today we are in the regime of ‘anything goes’, in which the task for art is to defeat any attempt at taxonomy or generalization, to have the object signify, either socially or stylistically. There are a number of names commonly given to this new work – scatter art, grunge, trash – but in principle there is nothing common to it all, it forms no identifiable school or style. Or perhaps more accurately, it is not that it has no style but that it attempts to point to the ‘outside’ of style within style, to show through the sheer disparateness of its materials the process of them coming together to form a unity as though this were somehow suspended or slowed down. The work might be understood to be trying to show the moment ‘before’ that system of style in which everything signifies, everything goes with everything else, even in the most unlikely or impossible of combinations. Of course, just as with the system of fashion in clothes, this attempt to take a certain distance onto the avant-garde in the visual arts can be seen as merely its latest version. And at the risk of a further self-contradiction, we divide this attempt to show the ‘outside’ of the system of art into two types or categories here: the first the ‘baroque’ attempt to defeat signification through excess or addition and the second the ‘minimalist’ attempt to do so through subtraction or withdrawal. The first can be seen in the project of the Los Angeles-based Jason Rhoades. (See Plate 14 in colour insert.) Rhoades originally started off as an installation artist with such pieces as Garage, Renovation New York (1993), in which the contents of a notional garage are spilled out into the gallery, and Fucking Picabia/Car with Ejection Seat (1997), which features the upside-down silhouette of a car held in place by aluminium pipes, atop

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which sits an inflated air safety bag, but his work soon became something much less identifiable. What Rhoades eventually became best known for was a sprawling long-running environment-cum-art-event, in which he took over an entire warehouse and filled it with acres of disparate and seemingly unrelated objects and materials. Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé (2005–6), held in a warehouse on Beverly Boulevard, next to Koreatown in Los Angeles, began with guests entering through the so-called Johnny Cash Gallery, before being greeted with some 427 suspended neon signs spelling out expressions for women’s genitalia in various English, African, Caribbean, Creole and hip-hop vernaculars – some of the more printable are ‘venus’, ‘tuft’ and ‘kitten’. Rhoades also arranged around the space 556 Native American dreamcatchers, a seized consignment of hookah pipes, 799 ceramic donkeys done in faux-Mexican style and 226 miniature brass Egyptian pyramids. There was as well a machine that shot hot wax around the space and scented homemade candles on the carts drawn by the donkeys.11 Predictably, in a typical art-world trajectory, the work was restaged at David Zwirner in New York in 2007 after Rhoades’ death, with an earlier version, Black Pussy and the Pagan Idol Workshop, mounted at Hauser and Wirth in London in 2005. Of this earlier version the reviewer for the Guardian newspaper exasperatedly wrote that he went looking for the ten ‘white virgins’ listed on one of Rhoades’ checklists, but couldn’t find them in any of the shelving units or storage racks, or even tucked under one of the numerous unmade beds scattered around the space.12 The second, contrasting example is the critically acclaimed first show for the then recently relocated New Museum in New York, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, held in 2007. It is a show that has been seen as influential in inaugurating or at least bringing to mainstream attention a new style of ‘non-sculpture’ or even ‘anti-sculpture’, but this is perhaps to misread it or lessen its impact. To describe just three of the works from the show, there was N.Y. (2006) by John Bock, in which the arms of a stuffed sweater are sewn to two laser discs, which then lead us through a series of plastic pipes to a metal table, on which a small casserole dish is balanced. On the other side of the room, a refrigerator, around which masking tape has been affixed, leans on a trolley against the wall, and next to that three taped-together bricks, an upside-down cup and a golf club either rest on or are inserted through a collapsed spiral suitcase. There was Isa Genzken’s Elefant (2006), in which a series of corrugated plastic tubes, bound together with wallpaper and bubble wrap, lean backwards over a rickety-looking cardboard plinth. The disassembled strips of a white vertical blind also hang over the plinth, and out of the middle of the wallpaper and bubble-wrap holding the tubes together silver and black plastic flowers thrust up into the air. (See Plate 15 in colour insert.) Finally, there was Rachel Harrison’s Huffy Howler (2004),

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in which a mountain bike is held up in the middle by what looks like a gluedtogether selection of purple-painted rocks. From the handlebars of the bike dangle a number of handbags filled with stones and gravel, while off the back of the bike, suspended from a long pole, flap a sheepskin and fox tails and a publicity still of Mel Gibson as William Wallace in the film Braveheart. (See Plate 16 in colour insert.) The curators of Unmonumental, of course – this is part of their professional responsibility, just like fashion and architectural writers in their field – sought to imbue the work with meaning and to provide an artistic genealogy for it. Thus one described the work as ‘modest’ and ‘unheroic’, which made it ideal for our ‘anti-utopian’ early twenty-first century, while another pointed to the work being ‘hurled into uncomfortable, anxious relationships, running parallel to life’.13 However, again, what we ultimately want to suggest is that the works more than anything seek to avoid these kinds of readings. They attempt not to signify, not to communicate, not to create an identifiable style through their bringing together of materials that would reflect a taste, a subject, a sensibility. Instead, what we see in the irredeemably heterogeneous elements that make up the work is not any kind of match or metaphor or even clash or collision, but a moment ‘before’ or ‘after’ this. Rhoades, we might say, through a certain excess or ‘maximalism’, seeks to break boundaries, to include too much to make sense of. He points towards a pure heterotopia of unclassified and unsublimated material, exactly like a warehouse that has lost its inventory. The sculptors of Unmonumental by contrast evidenced a ‘minimalism’ or withdrawal of aesthetic qualities, so that not everything but nothing is present. The former is a kind of crossing of boundaries or limits, an attempt to break the rules, both ethically and aesthetically, only to find that there is nothing to transgress. The latter by contrast does not go up to the limit, fails to muster the energy, will or self-belief to transgress. If each is ultimately modernist in its aesthetic success, influence and creation of a new artistic style, it is also something of a reflection upon this, how the artistic situation first arises in which everything has meaning and the artist cannot fail (this ‘origin’ perhaps figured by the synonyms for women’s genitals in Rhoades and the stillness or contrapposto of the sculpture in Unmonumental). *** Ultimately, without wanting to create another style, we would suggest a certain commonality between the hetero-architecture theorized by Jencks, the installations of Rhoades, the sculptures of Unmonumental and the clothes of Kawakubo. But we would emphasize that, if this is to point to the influence of Kawakubo or at least the pervasiveness of her sensibility, it is also a matter of questioning this. And altogether we would suggest that in

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all of these fields at the end of a long century of avant-gardism, it is not so much a matter of inventing a new style as thinking the conditions for the emergence of any possible new style. Or if the assumptions of avant-gardism are finally unavoidable, it would be as though each new work of art is not just another work of art but also about how this newness constitutes itself and is recognized. Each new work of art is not just itself but also attempts to think that impossible moment before its newness, as though it could for a moment be meaningless or without significance. In this sense, each new work attempts somehow to stand in for or outside of itself, to speak of that empty place or alternative it embodies, which exists or can be seen only after it has been filled. As Kawakubo once said in an interview with the British newspaper the Independent, ‘The meaning is there is no meaning.’14 It is in light of this that certain well-known and often remarked upon aspects of Kawakubo’s practice take on a special significance or become newly visible. We spoke a moment ago of Kawakubo’s particular use of black. We made the point that the black of her clothes is neither that unremarked background black of such classic designers as Chanel and Balenciaga, nor the transgressive foreground black of such punk designers as Westwood and Zandra Rhodes. Rather, we suggest, black in Kawakubo is a deliberately chosen signifying element that is as much as anything about the end of punk transgression. This is recognized by one of Kawakubo’s most insightful commentators Akiko Fukai, who speaks of the black in Kawakubo as a design element in itself: ‘Playing on its associations [with death and mourning, sophistication, gothic dandies and punks], Kawakubo and Yamamoto chose stoical black as the strongest tool for their expression.’15 But, more than this, we propose that black in Kawakubo embodies the fact that everything – even black, which previously was either neutral or outside of signification – now signifies. Black is not merely an element within fashion but represents fashion as such. Black, that is to say, stands in for or is divided from itself. And this is perhaps the true meaning of the two levels of black or the two different black materials that make up the ‘same’ black frequently seen in Kawakubo’s clothes, for example, the multi-levelled chiffon of Ink Dye, Stained Glass (Spring/Summer 1991) or the turtleneck velour coat that opens out onto an underlying velvet dress in Invisible Clothes (Spring/Summer 2017). And this might even be posited of any apparently undivided material, as in the internal shadows of Crush (Spring/ Summer 2013), or the variously dyed blacks of Patchworks and X (Spring/ Summer 1983), insofar as Kawakubo insists that she always works in at least ‘three shades of black’. (See Figure 13.4.) We might say something similar about another much-remarked upon aspect of Kawakubo’s designs: the stitch or seam. Of course, the visible stitch or seam, as seen in the single pattern put together in different ways of Tomorrow’s Black (Spring/Summer 2009) or the literally sewn-together

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FIGURE 13.4   Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Dress, Crush collection, Spring/Summer 2013. dresses of No Theme (Multiple Personalities) (Spring/Summer 2011), is a well-recognized and much-discussed aspect of Kawakubo’s practice. It is what leads commentators to use such words as ‘distressed’, ‘dismantled’ and ‘intentionally flawed’ when describing her clothes. And altogether in this regard both Kawakubo and Yamamoto can be shown to reveal the influence of Issey Miyake, who was perhaps the first to make this ‘unfinishedness’ an aspect of his garments. But particularly with regard to Kawakubo, this ‘unfinishedness’ is associated with the philosophical notion of deconstruction, which beyond the obvious pun is generally understood to indicate a certain reflection on what allows the making of her clothes. Here, for example,

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is fashion theorist Alison Gill in ‘Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-Assembled Clothes’: ‘Deconstruction in fashion is something like an auto-critique of the fashion system. It displays an almost X-ray capacity to reveal the enabling conditions of fashion’s bewitching charms. [The designer] reproduces the seamlessness of fashion … by the literal production of seams.’16 But we might also think of this seam in terms of that ‘in between’ that was the subject of Kawakubo’s retrospective at the Met, which was spoken of by curator Andrew Bolton in terms of a certain ‘space’: ‘In her work, space (ma) and emptiness (mu) coalesce in the concepts of interstitiality, the space between entities or boundaries.’17 And perhaps what all of this is to point to is the way that, if Kawakubo necessarily brings notionally unexpected or unmatched materials together as part of her creation of ‘new’ fashion, she also wants to keep them apart. In a season like Abstract Excellence (Spring/Summer 2004), in which the ‘same’ dress is reconfigured in thirty-four different ways, what the seams there seek to make visible is the very act of combining fashion elements to make meaning. And furthermore, as Gill suggests, even when these materials appear to go together, this is precisely an effect of the seam. The very point of the seam, like that black on black we just looked at, is that there is always something of a distance between the various elements in Kawakubo’s clothes, with their retrospective contingency now visible. Altogether, if we were to look to the fashion inheritors of Kawakubo, it would not perhaps be to her designated heirs in Comme such as Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara, who for obvious reasons turn Kawakubo too much into a style or manner. Arguably, her most profound inheritors are the designers of the so-called Antwerp Six (most notably, Ann Demeulmeester, Dries van Notes and Dirk Bikkenbergs) and their associate Martin Margiela. Demeulmeester’s clothing is frequently described, in that way we have seen standing in for the difficulty of speaking of how it signifies as fashion, as ‘austere’ and ‘introverted’. This can be seen in Luc Derycke’s description of her Summer 1999 collection in the following terms: ‘The shapes, developing further on those she started for the winter 1998–9 collection, were conceived from what Demeulmeester describes as the “zero base”, the source of the shape issue.’18 But undoubtedly of this group it is Margiela who has taken the lessons of Kawakubo furthest, both personally (the label for his clothing line is a blank white, he is not out in front of his clothes and he has even withdrawn from the fashion industry for periods) and in terms of his clothes. Margiela is perhaps best known for his deliberate mis- or better non-matching of various fabrics and materials, as seen in his Spring/Summer 1997 ‘Semi-couture’ show, in which the clothes were based on the mould of a tailor’s dummy and left in a preparatory state as though they were still being worked on in an atelier. And throughout his career he has made new season’s clothes by disassembling and

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reassembling previous seasons: leather gloves unsewn to make waistcoats, a turtleneck sweater made of mismatched socks, tulle ballgowns transformed into jackets  –  which, more than exhibiting ingenuity or any sense of their creator’s taste and sensibility, exhibits a kind of indifference, an attempt to point to the inherently substitutable status of every aspect of clothing. And perhaps as the ultimate expression of this there is the extraordinary 1997 museum retrospective at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, in which Margiela allowed fungus and mould to grow over dummies wearing each of his previous eighteen seasons, which more than a literal assault on clothing was an attempt to open it up to a different temporality, a suspension or slowing down of the ceaseless turnover of fashion.19 But, surprisingly, the other figure whom we see as a profound inheritor of Kawakubo is Alexander McQueen. At first sight, the two could not appear to be more opposed: the reclusive, introverted and colourless Kawakubo and the theatrical, extravagant and colourful McQueen. Of course, more than anything, McQueen is a ‘post-punk’ designer. His work is almost invariably treated by his commentators in terms of shock, transgression, outrage, the putting together of incongruous styles and materials that emphasizes their violent collision, their affront to conventional taste. In fact, the more nuanced interpretation of McQueen’s career is that what we witness there is the gradual sublimation of this original transgressive impulse as the street style of punk becomes the haute couture of his later work for Givenchy. But even this is not to get to the full complexity of his story. McQueen’s foundational collection is the controversial Highland Rape of Autumn/Winter 1995–6, in which he hung bodices off the models’ skirts, put a black chiffon dress under a suit of armour and combined for the first time, and seemingly impossibly, tartan with taffeta. It is perhaps this collection more than any other in contemporary design that proved that anything could become fashion, that like any avant-garde art it was a matter of the audience catching up with the sensibility of the designer in order to understand the hidden and previously unperceived affinities between chosen materials. However, we might suggest that, having accomplished this, McQueen was left with nothing to do. According to that concept of taste that he undoubtedly inherited, transgression would no longer be possible and anything could go with anything. And thus for the rest of his career McQueen does not simply put together things from as far away as possible – and here perhaps the analogy with Rhoades – but seeks to slow their inevitable coming together so that we can see something like the system of taste in operation. This can be seen in the show Voss put on in Spring/Summer 2001 after McQueen had left Givenchy, in which he famously made a razor clam and oyster shell dress and a dress made of ostrich feathers and medical slides painted red to imitate blood, and after leaving the audience waiting forty-five minutes at the start watching themselves in a mirror finished the show with a

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naked unmodel-thin woman (in fact, the writer Michelle Olley) wearing a gas mask and leaning on a couch staring back at the spectators. Could we find a more obvious metaphor for the attempt to ‘reflect’ upon the fashion system, to reveal the unsublimated blind spot that allows that narcissistic all-inclusivity in which everything eventually becomes fashion? *** Undoubtedly, Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System is one of the major works of theoretical scholarship on fashion, continually referenced, alluded to and even argued with throughout the fifty or so years since it was first published in 1967. It inaugurated a new era in fashion studies, literally a break between the old and the new. Instead of a broadly sociological analysis of fashion, seeking to understand it as a response to such external forces as status, class and economics, it seeks to grasp fashion as a language, whose first significance is internal. This is Barthes’ insistence that his book is concerned with what he calls ‘written fashion’ and not with fashion as such. As he states in the ‘Foreword’: ‘I very soon realised that a choice had to be made between the analysis of the real (or visual) system and that of the written system.’20 And to give an example of the distinction between Barthes’ method and previous approaches, we might just take the opposition between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ garments and ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ colours. These distinctions do not hold, or at least within what Barthes is calling ‘written fashion’, in relation to any external referent or signified. ‘Open’ or ‘closed’ is not some objective fact about the garment, just as ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ is not some perceptible distinction of colour. Rather, the difference applies only within the fashion discourse itself: a particular garment is ‘open’ only insofar as it is not ‘closed’ and ‘closed’ only insofar as it is not ‘open’, just as a particular colour is ‘white’ only insofar as it is non-‘non-white’ and ‘non-white’ only insofar as it is not ‘white’.21 It is the self-referential logic of fashion that comes first, a signifier that precedes any signified and produces it as its after-effect, which is also to say that there is nothing outside of the fashion system insofar as everything exists only insofar as it is signified. Again, as Barthes writes: ‘Written fashion coincides with the linguistic model which gives its signifieds only “within” its signifiers; we could say that, in such systems, the signifier and the signified are isological, since they are “spoken” simultaneously.’22 In all of this, Barthes follows the method of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics, originally taught at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911, was just becoming known in France at the time Barthes started writing. And Barthes himself would become one of the chief explicators and popularizers of Saussure’s method,

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applying it before a discipline like cultural studies to a variety of everyday objects, most famously to advertising and popular culture in Mythologies (1967) and most systematically to fashion in The Fashion System. But Barthes’ first book, written before his encounter with Saussure and for a long time – at least during the moment of his greatest fame and influence – largely unread because seemingly not very methodologically focused, is Writing Degree Zero (1953). And Writing Degree Zero is, indeed, very difficult to appropriate to any academic discipline insofar as it is a ‘dream’23 – whose utopian nature is frankly admitted – of a ‘neutral’, that is, ‘styleless’ and ‘colourless’, writing. The book is in fact directly inspired by the French New Novel and such writers as Raymond Queneau, Natalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose prose we might say is inaugurally ‘post-modern’: chosiste, post-avant-garde and postexperimental. It would be as though the long period of modernist innovation in literature, as exemplified by such writers as Joyce and Beckett, was over and all that can be done is to write ‘classically’ differently. (Indeed, read back through the New Novel, the real heroes of Barthes’ book are Camus, Gide and behind them Flaubert, whom Barthes credits anachronistically as already writing in a ‘zero degree’ in the mid-nineteenth century.) Barthes in Writing Degree Zero argues for this ‘neutral’ attitude, which as we say is at once chosiste, post-avant-garde and post-experimental. However, as he admits, it is a kind of fantasy. It is not in any way outside of literary style. It cannot avoid signifying, but exists only within signification and can only signify non-signification. Nevertheless  –  and this does not become clearer until his later work on semiotics, or it is why Writing Degree Zero is already a work on semiotics – this fantasy of a writing that has no style is very telling. For ultimately what it speaks of is the necessity for a certain empty placeholder or signifier without signified within a semiotic system: the fact that within an otherwise closed, self-contained and self-referential system of language, in which the external world is excluded or arises only as an effect of the system, there must always be one signifier that stands in for this outside, that captures something of the ‘event’ of this semiotic system that suddenly emerges out of nothing. Saussure in Course in his General Linguistics refers to this stand-in element simply as ‘chose’ or ‘thing’ and later speaks of it as a ‘shapeless mass’.24 And Barthes would certainly have been aware of the necessity for this element that stands in for the genesis of the system. It is hinted at almost unconsciously in Writing Degree Zero when he speaks of a ‘third term’ or ‘zero element’ that ‘takes place in the midst of all those ejaculations and judgements, without becoming involved in any of them’.25 And later in Elements of Semiology, written in 1964, by which time he had actually read Saussure, Barthes explicitly makes a place for this empty signifier without signified, which he calls the ‘zero degree’: ‘The zero degree is not a total absence (this is a common mistake), it is a significant absence. We have

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here a pure differential state; the zero degree testifies to the power held by any system of signs, of creating meaning “out of nothing”.’26 Crucially, we also have something of this in The Fashion System. Barthes’ point there is that everything in fashion signifies, which would mean that, just as ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ define each other, so anti-fashion is another form of fashion. But all of this, Barthes insists, only because there is something within the system that does not signify, a certain signifier without signified that stands in for the outside of the fashion system. It is what Barthes calls there the ‘shifter’, which is the element that holds the place of or otherwise enables the passage from real garment to ‘written’ garment or garment as sign.27 But we might equally imagine this along the lines of Writing Degree Zero as a certain ‘neutral’ moment within the system of signs, after it has constituted its signifying oppositions and distinctions. It would imply, along the lines of a ‘writing degree zero’, a certain utopian ‘fashion degree zero’. It would be a moment very hard to locate, no sooner spoken of than lost, turned into one half or another of those mutually defining opposites that are all there is. But it is perhaps hinted at in that moment in The Fashion System when Barthes speaks of a certain ‘nebulosity’ that puts what would ordinarily be opposed together: ‘This “nebulosity” is not a systematic lack. [Rather] the massive imprecision of the rhetorical signified is in fact an opening onto the world. Through its ultimate signified, fashion reaches the limit of its own system.’28 And in a way we have to imagine the entire fashion system as the attempt to do away with, take the place of, this neutrality or nebulosity, to restore it to signification, render it as either one of those signifying opposites out of which the system is constructed. Indeed, this is perhaps Barthes’ most profound insight concerning the fashion system in the book of that name: that it creates its own other or outside, that the entire system of fashion is nothing more than the endless attempt to cover over that non-signifying ‘thing’ it brings about. *** In one of her earliest public statements, given at a time when she spoke more freely about her work, Kawakubo said that she considers each season’s fashion a failure and each time she has to begin again: ‘I begin every collection, every aspect of design for Comme des Garçons, from zero.’29 It is a statement that, for obvious reasons as Kawakubo’s reputation has grown and a line of development began to be discerned in her work, has perhaps not been taken seriously enough. But, indeed  –  and some commentators have confirmed this  –  Kawakubo does mean this entirely seriously. Legendarily, Kawakubo’s designers do not know each season what she will come up with next. She will present an entirely unexpected idea to them  –  like the time she dropped a crumpled-up ball of paper on the desk at the beginning of

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the Autumn/Winter 2017 season  –  and challenge them to embody it. And as her seasons go on – and as the installation of her Metropolitan Museum show revealed – there is a constant turning back of her work upon itself, in an obvious sense to draw out some potential in it that has not yet been seen but in a less obvious sense to go back to the beginning before she started making fashion, to some kind of ‘origin’ of her fashion system altogether. Indeed, we might suggest that every element of Kawakubo’s clothing is an attempt to stand in for, to take the place of while allowing us to see, that moment before those signifying oppositions that make up her fashion system.30 Kawakubo’s is finally an attempt to make unrhetorical, inexpressive, not unfashionable but a-fashionable clothing. Not simply traditional and unchanging – although it is always tempting for Western writers to see something Japanese about this  –  but a kind of halting or suspension of the endless onward march of fashion. So that in the recent complaints that Kawakubo is no longer such an innovative designer as she once was we suggest she has finally attained her goal. The utopian dream of Barthes of a ‘neutral’ fashion, a ‘fashion degree zero’, has been realized. Barthes speaks of it as a ‘nebulosity’ in his book on the subject and it is a judgement echoed be one of Kawakubo’s best recent commentators, fashion academic Agata Zborowska, who writes: The strategy used [involving both the clarity and recognizability of specific fragments of clothes, and their surprising placement and accumulation in non-obvious places] operates within fashion, and is simultaneously directed against it, posing a question regarding the status of fashion in general. It is self-critical and operates from within the established system, which generates its self-referential character. The analysed projects [Comme des Garçon’s Persona (Autumn/Winter 2006–7) and Crush (Spring/ Summer 2013) seasons] … do not attempt to demolish, but rather show the arbitrariness of the foundations of the fashion world.31 We saw something of this in another recent Kawakubo show, Collecting Comme, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2019. (See Figure 13.5.) The first half of the show was conventional enough, exhibiting in broadly thematic and chronological terms an important collection of Comme by Australian collector Takamasa Takahashi. But over on the other side of the corridor that ran down the centre of the show, across which was hung a sign reading ‘Construction/Destruction’, there was as much as possible a refusal of this. The first season featured was the Autumn/Winter 2011–12 Hybrid, in which, in echo of a similar gesture by Margiela, Kawakubo simply made her new clothes by cutting up the old, resulting in a tight checkerboard of florals, paisleys and plaids, all held together by a tousled black silk ribbon running through them. And instead of the evenly lit and centrally placed mannequins

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FIGURE 13.5   Installation shot of Collecting Comme at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2019–20. on theatrical plinths of the first half, we had irregularly placed mannequins under misdirected indigo light housed in provisional-looking plywood boxes. But what was most notable is that on the outside of these boxes, in what can only be seen as the ultimate gesture of rejection or negation, we had a series of large Xs formed out of criss-crossing strips of gaffer tape. And almost like someone who cannot or refuses to write properly, we might see this X as Kawakubo’s signature: at once a crossing-out and what remains to be crossed out, a self-cancelling that will last forever for all those who come after her. Ever since the early collection Patchworks + X, this X has accompanied everything Kawakubo has done: an excess or remainder irreducible to form, that with which she starts and which continues after she has finished, waiting to be taken up the next time.

Notes 1 Claire Wilcox, Radical Fashion, V & A Publications, London, 2003, p. 34. 2 Celia Freiling, ‘Lost in Transit: Branding Concept for an Exhibition and Communication Strategy for DSM’ (https://www.celiamariefreiling.com/dsmlost-in-transit) accessed 25 October 2021.

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3 Terry Jones, ‘Rei Kawakubo’, i-D 104, May 1992, p. 72. Cited in Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Fashion, Berg, London, 2004, p. 138. 4 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2003, p. 196. 5 Leonard Koren, ‘Rei Kawakubo from New Fashion Japan’, in Terry Jones (ed.) Rei Kawakubo: Designer Monographs, Taschen, Cologne, 2012, n.p. 6 António Machuco Rosa, ‘From Dandyism to “Coco” Chanel: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Theory of Fashion’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 3(1), April 2016, p. 108. 7 Sylvia Lanvin, ‘Pas Comme des Architectes: On Becoming Rei Kawakubo’, in Rei Kawakubo: Refusing Fashion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, 2008, p. 39. 8 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1991, p. 73. 9 Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, n. 8, p. 40. 10 Charles Jencks, Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1993, p. 34. 11 See on this Nathan Danilowicz, ‘The Occidental Death of Jason Rhoades’, ArtUS 18, 2007, pp. 33–43. 12 Adrian Searle, ‘Sex Gods’, Guardian, 20 September 2005 (https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2005/sep/20/2) accessed 19 September 2021. 13 Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon, London, 2007, pp. 67, 12. 14 Kawakubo cited in Cal McCrystal, ‘Outrage at “Death Camp” Pyjama Fashion’, The Independent, 5 February 1992 (https://www.independent. co.uk/news/outrage-at-death-camps-pyjama-fashion-1571518.html) accessed 14 November 2021. 15 Akiko Fukai, ‘In Praise of Shadows’, in Catherine Ince and Rei Nii (eds), Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Merrell Publishers, London, 2010, p. 41. 16 Alison Gill, ‘Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-Assembled Clothes’, Fashion Theory 2(1), 1998, pp. 28, 42. 17 Andrew Bolton, Rei Kawakubo Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017, p. 13. 18 Luc Derycke, Belgian Fashion Design, Ludion, Brussels, 1999, p. 118. 19 For an overview of Margiela along these lines, see YeSeung Lee, ‘Distinction by Indistinction: Luxury, Stealth, Minimalist Fashion’, Luxury 6(3), 2019, pp. 203–25. 20 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990, p. x. 21 See Barthes, The Fashion System, n. 20, pp. 47–50, for the distinction ‘white/non-white’; and pp. 61–4, for the distinction ‘open/closed’. 22 Barthes, The Fashion System, n. 20, p. 192.

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23 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1977, p. 5. 24 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, p. 96. 25 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, n. 23, p. 76. 26 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Hill and Wang, New York, 1997, p. 77. 27 Barthes, The Fashion System, n. 20, p. 6. Barthes writes later of what he calls the ‘arch-vesteme’: ‘This explains why, whatever its provenance (alternative, polar, or serial oppositions), the arch-vesteme fulfils a certain function: neutralisation is not indifferent: it constitutes a redundance, but this redundance is not without consequence for the intelligibility of the message: the final non-signifying character of the features shift the effect of meaning back, as it were, onto the element which precedes it … but this assertion is accentuated, so to speak, by the fact that it is followed by an utterance of indifferentiation’ (p. 169). Barthes will also write in the paper ‘History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations’ (1957): ‘There may be a historical arbitrariness and a certain meaninglessness in a garment, a “degree zero”, as the structuralists say, of vestimentary signs’, in The Language of Fashion, Berg, Oxford, 2006, p. 14. 28 Barthes, The Fashion System, n. 20, p. 232. Barthes also devoted the entirety of this 1977–8 Lecture Course at the Collège de France to the topic of the ‘neutral’. See Roland Barthes, The Neutral, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 29 Cited in Robin Givhan, ‘Fashion’s Sphinx: Honouring Rei Kawakubo at the CFDA’, Newsweek, 28 May 2012 (https://www.newsweek.com/fashionssphinx-honoring-rei-kawakubo-cfda-64919) accessed 25 October 2021. 30 It is this that was the aim of Bolton’s Art of the In-Between: through the running of the same season across the apparently opposed categories of ‘Design/Not Design’, ‘Fashion/Anti-Fashion’, ‘Model/Multiple’ and ‘Clothes/ Not Clothes’ to point to their collapse or that which ‘precedes’ their instantiation. For more on this, see the chapter by Amelia Winata in this volume. 31 Agata Zborowska, ‘Deconstruction in Contemporary Fashion Design: Analysis and Critique’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 2(2), 2015, pp. 196–97.

Index Adorno, Theodor 54–5 an an 118–9, 130 anti-aesthetics 47, 54 anti-fashion 1, 2, 5, 7, 58, 66, 88, 103–5, 117, 142, 184, 193, 197, 202, 211, 213, 226 anti-art 66–7, 69, 73 Antonioni, Michelangelo 75 architecture 8, 41, 144, 182, 214–15, 219 Armani, Giorgio 61, 209 Arte Povera 54, 67 Art of the In-Between 7, 104, 177, 184–90, 193–207, 210, 227 Asahi Kasei Textile Company 74 astonishment 5, 157–8, 159, 164–6 Attwood, Fiona 126 Auschwitz 58–59 avant-garde 47, 54, 59, 81, 91, 181, 220 Bagley, Christopher 41 Balenciaga, Christóbal148, 201, 202, 210 220 Balla, Giacomo 142–3, 144, 145 ballet 117, 118, 121–8, 131, 145 Barr, Alfred H. 202 Bartal, Ory 4 Barthes, Roland 5, 21, 157–60, 162–3, 224–7 Batchen, Geoff 159, 172 Baudelaire, Jean 164 Baudrillard, Jean 55, 72–3 Bauhaus 203 Beckett, Samuel 225 Benjamin, Walter 51 Berenson, Ruth 202 Beyoncé 125 Bikkensbergs, Dirk 222 black 15–16, 107–9, 144, 179, 211, 220–1

Bock, John 218 Bolton, Andrew 181, 189, 193, 222 Bourdieu, Pierre 79 Bourgeois, Louise 161 Bourriaud, Nicholas 35 Braun, Emily 143, 144 Breton, André 170 Brown, Riva 31 Burman, Stuart 125 Butler, Judith 70 Byrd, Sarah C. 195 Callois, Roger 169–70 Camus, Albert 225 Cardin, Pierre 210 Carlyle, Thomas 148 Carrarini, Rose 34 Carter, Michael 159, 169–70 Cézanne, Paul 203 Chanel 1, 15, 19, 21, 163, 201, 210, 220 Chalayan, Hussein 62 Chong, Doryun 66 Cinderella 122 Clammer, John 73 Clark-Coolee, Bronwyn 5 Collecting Comme 8, 196, 204–5, 227–8 Comme des Garçons seasons Pirates A/W 81–82 11 Indigo, Dye and Twist S/S 82 11 Holes A/W 82–83 6, 12, 20, 48, 149, 165, 178–9, 184, 212 Patchworks + X S/S 83 11, 13, 212, 220, 228 Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats A/W 83–84 13 Round Rubber S/S 84 48 Twist, Silk + Jersey, Knits A/W 84–85 22–5

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Red is Black A/W 88–89 15 Movement S/S 89 184 Modern Sweetness A/W 90–91 199 Ink Dye, Stained Glass S/S 91 220 Lilith A/W 92–93 200 Eccentric S/S 94 186 Metamorphosis A/W 94–95 77 Transcending Gender S/S 95 188 Sweeter than Sweet A/W 95–96 187, 203–4 Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body S/S 97 69, 77, 145, 147, 184–5, 187, 189, 194, 196, 199, 200, 204, 211 Adult Punk A/W 97–98 186 Fusion A/W 98–99 184 Abstract Excellence S/S 2004 187, 194, 206, 222 Dark Romance, Witch A/W 2004–5 200 Ballerina Motorbike S/S 97 5, 118, 121, 126, 128, 187 Persona A/W 2006–7 70–1, 188, 196 Cubisme S/S 2007 187–8, 212 Cacophony S/S 2008 146–7, 188–9, 212 Bad Taste A/W 2008–9 187 Tomorrow’s Black S/S 2009 146–7, 220 Inside Decoration A/W 2010–11 185, 196, 198, 211 Hybrid A/W 2011–12 146, 227 White Drama S/S 2012 5, 118, 128, 131, 167, 187, 199, 2042 Dimensions A/W 2012–3 147, 184, 188–9, 199, 200 Crush S/S 2013 186, 220 The Infinity of Tailoring A/W 2013–4 188, 197–8, 204 Not Making Clothing S/S 2014 7, 74, 138, 146, 147–8, 166–7, 184 MONSTER A/W 2014–5 69, 150, 166, 195–6, 211 Blood and Roses S/S 2015 150, 166 Ceremony of Separation A/W 2015–6 131, 150, 151, 166

Blue Witch S/S 2016 166, 200 Invisible Clothes S/S 2017 7, 184, 200, 220 Future of the Silhouette A/W 2017–8 69, 178, 189–90, 227 Constructivism 54, 169 counterculture 66, 73, 75 Crane, Diana 91 ‘Creative Manifesto’ 138, 152 Crow, Thomas 34 Cunningham, Merce 141, 204–5 ‘cuteness’/kawaii 5, 118, 121, 126, 127–31 Dada 80 De Beauvoir, Simone 125 deconstructivist 68–9, 74, 182 deconstruction/deconstructionist 51, 79, 144, 180, 181–3, 221–2 Demeulemeester, Ann 62, 165, 222 Depero, Fortunato 145 De Perthuis, Karen 5 Derrida, Jacques 182–3 Derycke, Luc 222 Diderot, Denis 131 Dior, Christian 1, 15, 210 Docherty, Anne Marie 30, 31 Dover Street Market (DSM) 4, 8, 27, 38–42, 52–3, 138, 147, 209 Duchamp, Marcel 54 Duffy, Kat 4 D’Ys, Julien 194 East 13, 88, 99, 104, 105, 187, 197, 198 Edelkoort, Lidewij 142 Eisenman, Peter 183 elsewhere 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 168–71 English, Bonnie 8, 38, 52, 104, 105, 110 female 91–2, 96, 111, 119, 121, 124–6, 143–4, 187, 197–8 feminism 4, 69, 92, 143–4 Fenollosa, Ernest 101 Finkelstein, Joanne 59 flagship stores 31, 32 Flaubert, Gustav 225 Foster, Hal 203 Foucault, Michel 35

INDEX Frankel, Susannah 27 Freling, Celia 209 Fringis, Gini 30 Fukai, Akiko 2, 3–4, 20, 107, 149, 165, 171 Furniss, Jo-Ann 151 Future Beauty 104, 110, 171 Futurism 141–5 Galiano, John 59–60 Ganryu, Fumito 65, 137, 141 Gauguin, Paul 203 Gaultier, Jean Paul 21, 126, 197 Geczy, Adam 8 Gehry, Frank 215–7 Genzken, Isa 218 Georgieva, Veronika 54 Gide, André 225 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 56 Gill, Alison 222 glamour 47, 48–9, 51, 54–7, 59, 61, 62 Grant [Nobbs], Karinna 4, 30, 32 Greenpeace 142 Gregson, Nicky 42 grunge 149, 205, 217 guerrilla store 35, 53, 147 Gunning, Tom 166 Hanna, Julian 142 Hardy, Françoise 19 Harrison, Rachel 218–19 Harvey, Hana B. 125 Harvey, John 148, 150 Hegel, G.W.H. 21, 177, 183 Heidegger, Martin 141 Henriot, Henriette 101 heterotopia 34 Hetherington, Kevin 34 Hill, Coleen 121 Hirakawa, Takeji 87 Hirano, Kōga 67 Horsley, Jeffrey 202 Hutcheon, Linda 59 Hyzagi, Jacques 38 Ikeda, Hayato 72 Ishioka, Eiko 67 in-between 182–3, 190 Inoue, Tsuguya 74–5

233

Jansenism 29 Japan 4–5, 13–14, 49, 66–7, 72, 91, 99–103, 105, 180 Japaneseness 3, 11, 61, 69–70, 87–8, 95, 111 Japonisme 100–4 Jenckes, Charles 214–7, 219 Joffe, Adrian 27–9, 38–9, 41, 42, 140–1 Jones, Terry 210 Joyce, James 225 kachikan 147, 162 Kansara, Vikram 32 Karaminas, Vicki 8 Karina, Anna 131 Kawamura, Yuniya 84, 104, 105, 110 Kawasaki, Takao 30 Kent, Tony 31 Kenzo (Takada) 11, 104–5, 180, 197 Kim, Hye-Jeong 37, 38 kimono 99–102 Kimura, Tets 4 King, Rodney 215 Kinsella, Sharon 128 Koda, Harold 20, 49, 158, 161–2, 171 Kondo, Dorinne 59, 61, 165 Koolhaus, Rem 141 Koren, Leonard 50, 213 Kosuth, Joseph 54 Kozasu, Atsuko 77 Kozinets, Robert 30 Kraner, Joan 179 Krell, Gene 120 Kristeva, Julia 80 Kurihara, Tao 65, 131, 137, 141, 180, 204 Kuramata, Shiro 68 Lacroix, Christian 61, 179 Lanvin, Jeanne 210 La Sylphide 122 Lavin, Sylvia 53, 214 Lee-Greenwood, Gaynor 37 Lehmann, Ulrich 163 Levinas, Emmanuel 183 Lindbergh, Peter 12, 77, 164

234

INDEX

ma 7, 222 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ 141, 142 Margiela, Martin 7, 14, 21, 61, 165, 201–2, 222–3, 227 Marinetti, Filippo 141, 143, 144, 145 Marra-Alvarez, Melissa 119 Martin, Richard 61, 158, 165, 168 McDowell, Colin 105 McQueen, Alexander 61, 197, 223–4 McQuiltan, Grace 57 McVeigh, Brian J. 128 Mears, Patricia 68–9, 104, 110, 126 Meiji Restoration 100 Mellon, Polly 149 Menkes, Suzy 1, 41, 43, 88, 150 Menpes, Mortimer 101, 102 Mikunda, Christian 30, 33 Miller, Laura 128 Miskec, Jennifer M. 124 Mitchell, Louise 185 Miyake, Issey 11, 19, 80, 104, 105, 111, 150, 165, 180, 197, 221 modernism 1–2, 81, 181, 201, 203, 211, 215 Monden, Masafumi 5 Monet, Claude 101 mono-ha 66 Montana, Claude 179 Montgomery, Lucy 130 Moore, Christian 30, 31 Mori, Hanae 19–20, 104–5, 110 Morphosis 216 Moss, Eric Owen 215 mu 7, 222 Mugler, Thierry 201 Mullane, David 33, 36 Murakami, Takashi 57 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 203

Olley, Michelle 224 Ono, Yoko 67, 111 Orientalism 14, 19, 103, 111 other/otherness 35, 65, 70, 159, 161–2, 170–2, 183

Narumi, Hiroshi 111 negative aesthetics 1, 19–20, 160, 165 Negrin, Llewellyn 4 neo-Japonisme 104 neutral 92, 220, 225–7 Niehm, Linda 37, 38 Ninomiya, Kei 65, 137, 141 Norris, Bernadette 189

Said, Edward 14, 103 Saint Laurent, Yves 19, 178, 202, 204, 209 Saisselin, Remy 51 Sarraute, Natalie 225 Sartre, Jean-Paul 172 Saussure, Ferdinand de 182, 224–5 Schiaparelli, Elsa 1 Schneier, Matthew 200–1 Shanabrook, Stephen 54 Shawcross, Nancy 159, 160, 163

Obrist, Hans Ulrich 140–1, 147, 161–2 Oldenberg, Ray 33

Paillié, Elisabeth 126 Perry, Katy 125 Piero della Francesca 21 photography 5, 67, 77–8, 157, 159, 172, 203 Poiret, Paul 13, 19 Pollock, Jackson 80 pop-up stores 37–8 porno-chic 125–6 Posner, Harriet 38 postmodernism 2, 144, 196, 214, 225 Pound, Ezra 145 punk 1–2, 16, 80, 107, 210–11, 213 Queneau, Raymond 225 Ravel, Maurice 120 ReFusing Fashion 158, 161, 168–9 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 101 Retail Design blog 32 Reynolds, Johnathan 28 Rhoades, Jason 217–8, 219, 223 Rhodes, Zandra 220 Richards, Harriet 194 Rihanna 125 Rikyū, Sen no 14 Rivette, Jacques 131 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 225 Robinson, Karen 125 Rosa, Antonio Machudo 213 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 182 Russell, Ken 211

INDEX Sherman, Cindy 53, 77, 167 shock 159, 165–6 shōjo (girl) 122, 126, 127, 128–31 Simmel, George 100, 110, 111 Sims, Josh 8 Singer, Roman 75 Sinnerbrand, Laura 169 Six 53, 77, 138, 141, 164, 169, 171 Skov, Lisa 201 Sleeping Beauty 122 Smelik, Anneke 1 Smith, Rosemary 101 Spears, Brittany 125 Spencer, Herbert 104, 105, 110 Spivak, Gayatri 180 Spyri, Johanna 130 Steele, Valerie 119 Stone-Richards, Michael 158, 159, 164, 168 Sudjic, Deyan 88, 119 Surrealism 80, 158–9, 166, 168–71 Swan Lake 122 System magazine 141, 147–8 Takahashi, Takamasa 204, 227 Tanaka, Atsuko 67 Tanizaki, Juni’chirō 14–15 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 120 third space 32–4 Thurman, Judith 1, 138–9, 179–80 Townsend, Chris 55–6 Trebay, Guy 35 Tschumi, Bernard 183

235

Van Gogh, Vincent 101, 102, 203 Van Notes, Dries 222 Veblen, Thorstein 105, 110 Venturi, Robert 214–5 Versace, Gianni 49, 55, 179 Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth 123 Vinken, Barbara 3, 4, 160–1, 165–6 Vionnet, Madeleine 3, 21, 210 Volt [Vicenzo Fani] 142–4, 145, 147 Vreeland, Diana 202 Vuitton, Louis 57 wabi-sabi 14, 20, 49–50, 70, 149 Warhol, Andy 55, 80 Washida, Kiyokazu 6–7 Watanabe, Junya 65, 111, 137, 141, 180, 204 Waters, John 149 Westwood, Vivienne 1, 121, 141, 142, 187, 197, 211, 220 Wilcox, Claire 209 Wilson, Elizabeth 169, 210 Yamamoto, Kansai 11 Yamamoto, Yohji 11, 12, 13–5, 19, 89, 90, 104 Yamazaki, Madoka 131 Yokoo, Tadanori 67, 68, 73 Zborowska, Agata 227 Zen Buddhism 20 zero jigen (Zero Dimension) 67 Žižek, Slavoj 74

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PLATE 1  Dover Street Market, London View of stall selling T-shirts, mirror on side Photo by View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 144834056

PLATE 2  Cindy Sherman. Untitled, 1994 Chromogenic colour print, 124.4 × 83.8 cm Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth © Cindy Sherman

PLATE 3  Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva. Paper Surgery, 2010 Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Spring/Summer 2010 Image courtesy of Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva

PLATE 4  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons MONSTER collection, Autumn/ Winter 2014–15, Paris Fashion Week, 1 March 2014 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 475798749

PLATE 5  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons The Future of the Silhouette collection, Autumn/Winter 2017, Paris Fashion Week, 4 March 2017 Photo by Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 648498104

PLATE 6  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Persona collection, Spring/Summer 2018, Paris Fashion Week, 30 September 2017 Photo by Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 856523948

PLATE 7  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Not Making Clothing collection, Spring/Summer 2014, Paris Fashion Week, 28 September 2013 Photo by Joel Saget/ AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 182121102

PLATE 8  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Blood and Roses collection, Spring/ Summer 2015, Paris Fashion Week, 27 September 2014 Photo by Bertrand Guay/ AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 456203798

PLATE 9  Hanae Mori. East Meets West collection, Tokyo, 9 September 2004 Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 51277621

PLATE 10  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Ceremony of Separation collection, Autumn/Winter 2015–16, Paris Fashion Week, 7 March 2015 Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 465499034

PLATE 11  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Dress, Crush collection, Spring/ Summer 2013 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Takamasa Takahashi, 2019 © Comme des Garçons Photo by Christian Markel/NGV

PLATE 12  Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons Blue Witch collection, Spring/ Summer 2016, Paris Fashion Week, 3 October 2015 Photo by Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images Getty Images Editorial Number 491130160

PLATE 13  The entrance to Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between showing the category Absence/Presence at centre The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 May to 4 September 2017 Art Resource 678545

PLATE 14  Jason Rhoades. Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé, 2006 Mixed media, dimensions variable Private Collection Courtesy the Estate of Jason Rhoades Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner © The Estate of Jason Rhoades Installation view, Black Pussy Soirée Macramé, 3113 Beverley Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2006 Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio

PLATE 15  Isa Genzken. Elefant, 2006 Wood, plastic tubes, curtain strips, plastic foil, mirror foil, artificial flowers, fabric, plastic, toy figures, bubble foil, adhesive tape, lacquer, spray paint, 200 × 220 × 100 cm Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Cologne/New York © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Viscopy Ltd., Sydney

PLATE 16  Rachel Harrison. Huffy Howler, 2004 Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, Huffy Howler bicycle, handbags, rocks, stones, gravel, brick, one sheepskin, two fox tails, metal pole, wire, pigmented inkjet print and binder clips, 213.4 × 213.4 × 76.2 cm Photo by Jean Vong Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York