In Japan, women still struggle to be taken seriously, to be executives, and to be single women who are interested in something other than landing a man. The birth of a male is still preferred to that of a female and there’s more attention paid to Princess Masako’s reproductive skills than to her Ivy League education (the name as published has been corrected in this text)..
Given this climate of gilded femininity, it’s not surprising that fashion is a preoccupation. However, it’s remarkable that it yielded Rei Kawakubo, an internationally influential designer. Not just because Kawakubo is a woman, but also because of the nature of her clothes.
They’re not hyper-feminine or cartoonish. They are powerful abstractions, bold looks. In the late 1970s, Kawakubo, a former advertising artist and stylist, upended preconceived notions of femininity in clothing. Fashion found a new voice in her baggy, unconstructed tops and bottoms that drew on her Japanese background, particularly masculine culture, and what kids wore in the East and West on the street.
Kawakubo’s clothes have been called angry. As a woman, making her way in a world repressive of women, she had much to be angry about. More recently, her designs express wonderful humor, as in looks patterned on clown suits or ruffles hidden in the lining of otherwise sober tailored jackets.
When Kawakubo came along slashing, twisting, bonding and sculpting fabric, most designers were still cutting and sewing. One of a vanguard of Eastern designers, which included Issey Miyake, Kenzo and Yohji Yamamoto (to whom she was briefly married), she shocked Paris to attention with her new approach to design in her first runway show in 1981.
Don’t be misled. Kawakubo has been known to make a beautiful, easily comprehensible shirt, an exquisite evening wrap that would not, in most company, have people gawking at you for all the wrong reasons. However, her trademark is to be found in designs like a three-sleeved garment, inside-out jackets or elongated sleeves.
She dumbfounded even the most open-minded fashion editor when she presented what was derisively and affectionately called the humpback collection. Kawakubo placed rolls of fabric on the body beneath dresses. The effect was a humpback, a pregnant woman and its most extreme, a grotesque deformity. Isn’t fashion supposed to beautify? Once again, Kawakubo challenged our accepted notions of fashion.
Kawakubo has attracted clients who possess sufficient self-confidence to wear an article of clothing which is radically different and can be commanded only as an act of intellect,” says the handbook for the exhibit “Three Women.” Staged in 1987 by Harold Koda (now chief curator for the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute), Laura Sinderbrand and Richard Martin, the exhibit noted Kawakubo’s worldwide influence on fashion and women.
Though she was widely admired for her integrity, the fashion establishment did not immediately embrace Kawakubo’s sometimes dense intellectual discourses in clothes. But she persevered and she may even have benefited in a perverse way, the rejection reinforcing her outsider status. A streetwise designer at 50 is a beautiful thing.
Paving the way for today’s generation of modernist designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Ennio Capasa of Costume National, Helmut Lang and Hussein Chalayan, her influence is stronger than ever. In fact, anyone who stays close to the street or embraces the possible abstraction in fashion seems to owe a debt to Kawakubo. And she continues to innovate with astonishing regularity.
“I’m inspired by her work,” explains Capasa. “She [is] one of the most important innovators of this century in fashion.”
Demeulemeester believes it is Kawakubo’s relentless iconoclasm and her courage that may be her strongest legacy. “Since I was very young I’ve understood her as someone following her own path, not afraid to experiment,” the Belgian designer, herself a maverick, said recently. “The most important thing to me is she is someone with her own voice. It’s very important, especially as a woman, to have your own voice.”
Kawakubo’s innovations extend beyond fashion to how she markets her work. She was at the forefront of the movement toward pristine designer stores that resemble art galleries more than clothing boutiques, each article of clothing displayed on a shelf or suspended like a piece of art. When she introduced her first fragrance, it was in an amoebic bottle that could not stand up. It had to be laid flat on its back.
Being personally elusive has only added to the mystique and brought Kawakubo’s work into sharper focus. She is not the first designer to adapt this stance; Cristobal Balenciaga, too, rarely spoke to the press. Frenchman Martin Margiela uses this approach, and from time to time a young designer tries to seduce the public and fashion journalists by making themselves unavailable. It rarely works and they soon give it up.
But Margiela has had some success with it, or in spite of it, and he is one of the influential modernist designers who owe a debt to Kawakubo. Often thought of as the father of deconstruction, Margiela’s designs build on Kawakubo’s foundation. Before Margiela came on the scene, she was leaving seams unfinished, turning garments inside out and using the construction of a garment in its design, essentially exposing its interiors and pulling them apart.
“What she really represents,” says Capasa, “is the ability to stay on top for so many years. For my generation, she was the mother.”
