In conversation: Reflecting on Rei Kawakubo's legacy

Rei Kawakubo has defied convention to redefine fashion for nearly five decades. Since founding Comme des Garçons in 1969, Kawakubo’s iconoclastic vision has made her one of the most influential garment designers of the 20th century; subverting shape and function, reframing ideas of beauty, and proposing a new relationship between body and dress. Kawakubo was the first Japanese designer to bring their brand to the Paris Fashion Week schedule and, 40 years in, she continues to set international trends. In 2004, Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in London’s Mayfair district – conceived to sell new, conceptual and trendsetting brands, and which later expanded to Ginza, New York, Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles and Paris. In 2017, she was the focus of a major retrospective at the New York Met, ‘Art of the In-Between’ –  the first living designer to be honoured as such since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.

Here, four esteemed figures from the world of art, design and architecture reflect on Kawakubo’s incredible legacy.

Gus Casely-Hayford, director, V&A East

‘Rei Kawakubo is such a distinctive presence, not just within fashion, but within the design world. A totally unique voice. It's not just her exemplary standards – of cutting, of design, of conception – but her vision, of taking fashion to a different place. Of it not being about tiny, incremental, seasonal steps, but of completely blowing the parameters off of what was possible and then creating something astonishingly beautiful as well as revolutionary. 

My late brother was a fashion designer and someone who I absolutely adored. One day, he was talking to me about his heroes, about the people who drove him, and the person that he kept coming back to was this almost mythical figure of Rei Kawakubo. So I discovered Rei’s work through my brother's love of her; a love for someone who sat on the periphery, but was strong enough in their vision to move the gravity of fashion toward her, rather than gravitating toward it, and then to underwrite that vision with a kind of a moral belief in trying to recalibrate the fashion world as something that was grounded in sustainability, equity, those sorts of things. But then also to create clothes that broke rules, that were exquisite and engineered in ways that asked questions about sartorial possibilities and history. Someone who was the complete tailor, but also an artist.’

Amanda Levete CBE, architect and director-founder of AL_A:

‘I met Rei at the end of the 1990s. She asked if we would design a new facade for a store that she was doing in New York. She had a store in the West Village, but she wanted to move it to a part of the city that only the aficionados would go to. 

She took a building in Chelsea. At the time, there were no galleries or shops – it was a rare piece of New York's industrial heritage. And she said, “I'd like you to do something low key, but to re-clad it. I don't want to make a big noise.” We went away and thought how rare it was to have an industrial building in New York – it was a good scale, with fantastic graffiti and beautiful signage. So we said to her, “Let's leave everything and just do this fabulous transition between inside and outside.” Because of her innate confidence to volte face she trusted us, and that was the beginning of a fantastic relationship where we did a triptych: the store in New York, a store in Tokyo and one in Paris.

Introducing Dover Street Market was a total game changer. It wasn't just about her clothes, it was about embracing and supporting other designers. As well as being fearless, she's this great mentor to up and coming designers, and has the humility and the confidence to give them as much space as she has herself.’

Gregor Muir, director of collection, International Art, Tate:

‘When I've spoken to artists who like Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçon’s approach, they talk about it as an artistic decision that's already been made for them. The American sculptor Ronnie Horn, for instance, only wears Comme des Garçons and said to me once that it was “a decision made for her some time ago”. I liked hearing that from someone so precise and challenging, and perhaps anarchistic themselves. So I see that the walking across these areas of fashion, art, design and beyond is really inherent to Kawakubo’s practice, because the thought is mobile. The thought is the thing that we need to look at, and that can move freely across a whole range of practices. 

I can think of three words to describe Rei. First, disobey: take the instructions and don't do that. Then, precision: by which I mean the way in which she collages things, the way that things are precisely brought together, both in terms of the idea and in terms of the making. And third, a sense of wonderment. I often look at her works thinking there is a play with the idea of beauty; but there's also a childlike sense at the core of it. The way she makes things comes through memory and what inspired her. It radiates wonderment.’

Alice Rawsthorn, design critic and author:

‘Every aspect of Rei Kawakubo’s work is steeped in her zest for experimentation, and her determination to reinvent and deconstruct the form and function of her fashion collections –  and, critically, their ability to enable the wearer to express their personal identity. As a result, her work is unalloyedly original, idiosyncratic and singular and free from convention in terms of gender stereotypes. Every aspect of her work reflects her own sensibility, and also our perceptions of her. Other designers have done this in the past: Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent, were all brilliant at it, but none of them have done it quite as compellingly and critically, as audaciously, as Rei Kawakubo.

I first encountered her work in the mid-1980s when I was in my mid-20s, when she had just started to show the Comme des Garçons collections in Paris. It's impossible to overstate how thrilling it was: a sort of mash-up of punk influences, but also mingei – the early-20th-century Japanese folk craft movement, which was every bit as subversive at the time. She deconstructed the codes of Japanese workwear to create clothes that made the women who wore them, and young feminists like me, feel strong, powerful, confident and ambitious – everything we weren’t supposed to feel at the time.’