Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons and the Heart With Eyes

In 1964 Rei Kawakubo graduated from Keio University in Tokyo with a degree in the history of aesthetics and took a job in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a textile company. Her training was in looking at things, not in cutting cloth. In 1967 she went freelance as a stylist, and by 1969 she was designing and making her own clothes.

You can see that start in every Comme des Garçons collection since. The clothes look like they were designed by someone who came at fashion from the outside, as images and ideas first and garments second.

Tokyo, then Paris

Kawakubo, born in Tokyo on October 11, 1942, started the Comme des Garçons label in 1969 and incorporated it as a company in 1973. The first boutique opened in Tokyo in 1975, and a men's line followed in 1978. Then came Paris. The company showed there for the first time in 1981 and opened a Paris boutique in 1982.

The 1982 collection, known as Destroy, is the one people still argue about. It was savaged by the press, and critics settled on labels like Hiroshima chic. The labels were cruel and they missed the point, but they also proved she had broken something. Nobody writes that kind of headline about a collection they can ignore.

The usual reading is that she wanted to start from zero, ten years into her own label. Destroy was what zero looked like.

Lumps, bumps and a museum

For the next fifteen years Comme des Garçons kept testing what a garment could be. The defining show was Spring/Summer 1997, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, which built padding into the clothes so the body's outline bulged where no body does. It became known as the lumps and bumps collection, and it led to a collaboration with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, a dance piece called Scenario.

Not every provocation landed well. The Sleep menswear show of 1995, with shaved heads and striped pajamas, was attacked for evoking concentration camp uniforms, and a 2020 menswear show drew criticism over cultural appropriation. A label that makes discomfort its method sometimes misjudges whose discomfort it is borrowing.

In May 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, about 150 outfits arranged in an all-white maze. Kawakubo was only the second living designer the Met's Costume Institute had honored this way, according to her Wikipedia biography. The show treated the clothes the way the brand always has, as objects to walk around rather than outfits to buy.

The heart with eyes

And yet the Comme des Garçons piece most people actually own is probably a cotton T-shirt with a cartoon on it.

PLAY launched in 2002, a line of graphic tees, knits and accessories that sits outside the seasonal runway calendar. Its logo, a red heart with a pair of eyes, came from the Polish artist Filip Pagowski. He had written to Kawakubo in the 1980s, was cast in a Comme des Garçons show in summer 1992, and drew the heart as a separate idea that first went to another company project before PLAY claimed it, according to AnOther.

In 2009 PLAY partnered with Converse on the Chuck Taylor All Star, a plain canvas sneaker with that red heart on the side. It is still in production more than fifteen years later, and its staying power makes sense once you know the shoe underneath, which we cover in our history of the Converse Chuck Taylor. PLAY added a fragrance in 2007, and the house's perfume line goes back to 1993, with Odeur 53, an anti-perfume, released in 1998. Anyone into the stranger end of scent should read our piece on Le Labo and niche fragrance.

Selling the strange

The other half of the business belongs to Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo's husband, who joined the company in 1987, married her at Paris City Hall in 1992 and now runs Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market as chief executive. Dover Street Market opened in London in 2004, then in Ginza in 2012 and New York in 2013, and it turned the Comme des Garçons way of seeing into retail. Our London Soho and Dover Street Market guide covers the original. The same year, 2004, the company opened its first Guerrilla store in Berlin, a pop-up shop set to close after a year.

The company also works as an incubator. Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara both started their own labels inside it, and Comme des Garçons partnered with H&M in 2008, a high street collection from the least high street designer alive. For the Tokyo shops where designer labels and streetwear now sit on the same rails, see our Ura-Harajuku guide. Our Japan topic hub and the Style section have more.

Buy the heart tee if you want the easy way in. Then go look at a 1997 lumps and bumps dress behind glass, and notice that the same company made both.