What Comme des Garçons is known for
Rei Kawakubo’s republic — the Aoyama flagship behind the blue-dot glass tunnel, where clothing has argued with itself since 1969; enter curious, leave changed.
Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969 and, upon showing in Paris in 1981, detonated fashion's assumptions: black, asymmetric, deliberately unfinished clothes the press called 'Hiroshima chic' and history now calls the moment Japanese design conquered the West. Kawakubo has never softened — her collections remain conceptual arguments, her 2017 Met retrospective only the second given a living designer — while the house she built spans lines from the radical mainline to Play, whose heart-with-eyes logo made the avant-garde wearable by everyone. The Minami-Aoyama flagship in Tokyo is the mothership, its architecture as considered as the clothes. Enter through Play or the shirts if the mainline intimidates; collectors hunt the runway pieces. No living designer has held the line between art and clothing this uncompromisingly for this long.
The Aoyama flagship rewards visiting even without buying; architecture, staff dress, and hang of the clothes together teach what the label is arguing that season.
In the press
- Le Monde 2024
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — The argument of fashion itself.
Japan
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- Auralee — Tokyo
Where next
- GUM — Moscow
- Somerset Choice Station — United States
- Western Isles Designs (The Weaving Shed) — United Kingdom
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