Rei Kawakubo Comme Des Gar Ons

Widely recognized as among the most important and influential designers of the past forty years, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has defined and transformed the visual language of our time. Since her Paris debut in 1981, she has blurred the divide between art and fashion and transformed customary notions of the body, beauty and identity. This lavishly illustrated publication weaves an illuminating narrative around Kawakubo's revolutionary experiments in interstitiality—the space between boundaries. Brilliant new photographs of more than 120 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for Comme des Garçons, accompanied by Kawakubo's commentary on her designs and creative process, reveal her conceptual and challenging aesthetic as never before. A chronology of Kawakubo's career provides additional context, and an insightful conversation with the author offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this fashion visionary.

Comme des Garcons--"like the boys"--is the title of a French soldier's song. It is also the label of Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, whose mysterious creations are often closer to sculpture than to clothing. Here is the story of her life as one of the most influential and subversive figures in contemporary fashion.

Graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s, Martin Margiela (and his contemporaries in the Antwerp Six) transformed global fashion with his aggressive restatement of traditional fashion design and a polemical approach to luxury trends. Working first with the house of Gaultier, Margiela absorbed the radical design of Japanese deconstruction, making it wholly his own with the founding of his own label in 1988. Margiela propounds a singular, enigmatic look, moving beyond the recognizable tropes of deconstruction—a monochromatic palette, outsized garments, non-traditional fabrics, exposed seams, or roughly appliquéd details—to develop a fully considered worldview, one with elegance, mystery, and menace in equal measure. This book provides an inside look at the design process from a craftsman who creates pieces prized for their originality, delicacy, and daring. In the spirit of Margiela’s garments, the book is a work of art in itself, designed exclusively by Margiela and complete with silver inks, ribbon markers, a variety of lush paper types, twelve booklets, and an embroidered white-linen cover. This book provides a window onto the intimate, handmade world of a unique designer.

Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness. Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time.

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

The Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is undoubtedly one of the world's major fashion designers. In 2017 she was the second living designer to ever be given a retrospective at the renowned Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work exerts an extraordinary influence over succeeding generations of designers and is a major point of reference for all those wishing to explore the place of fashion in contemporary culture. The 14 essays in this collection, written by eminent fashion theorists from around the world, ask what is the relationship of Kawakubo's work to art, philosophy and architecture, and ultimately illustrate how Kawakubo's creative output allows us to understand the very notion of fashion itself.

The old guard of fashion despised her; the critics never understood her. But for Rei Kawakubo, founder of the renowned fashion label Comme Des Garcons, that was always the point. For the more polarising a collection was, the more success it accrued. Kawakubo eschewed conventional standards of beauty, ushering in a new era of anti-fashion; a deconstructed wonderland of noir, capable of creating strong, provocative pieces for women with a defiant desire to dress in a way that reflected their own unique sensibilities. Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942, the eldest of three siblings and sole daughter of the family. Her father was an administrator at Keio University; her mother, a trained English teacher whom remained at home to raise the family. Though she insisted her home life was comfortable, even ordinary, Kawakubo came from a family of divorce - a rarity in Japanese culture at the time. Her mother had wished to enter the workforce when her children came of age; her father, however, expressly forbade it. In most Japanese households during that time and of their social standing, this would have been the end of discussion: the patriarchal law meant his word was final. But the Kawakubo's were no ordinary family - their mother insisted on a divorce, leaving her husband to fulfill her dream of becoming a high school teacher. It was an act that instilled a sense of defiance in her young daughter, teaching the values of independence and determination, a defining moment that Kawakubo would look to for resolve over the course of her life. In 1960, Kawakubo attended her father's university and undertook a degree in "the history of aesthetics," a course that considered both Eastern and Western culture and art. When she graduated in 1964, she left home and without telling her parents, moved into a shared apartment in the seamy Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Kawakubo has always asserted she owns a duality of personality, and her early adult years did much to cultivate this notion: while the bohemian lifestyle of Harajuku spoke to her inherent desire to "break the rules," the other half - gifted through education and the affluent social circles she formed during university - held a deep concern for both "tradition and history."