Commes des Garçons

Comme des Garçons was founded in Tokyo in 1969 by Rei Kawakubo, who studied fine arts and aesthetics at Keio University and came to fashion through a position in the advertising department of a textile company, with no formal design training. The name, meaning "like boys" in French, was taken from a line in Françoise Hardy's 1962 song Tous les garçons et les filles. The house developed a following in Japan through the 1970s, opening 150 franchised boutiques, before Kawakubo presented her first Paris collection in 1981. Critics dismissed it as "Hiroshima chic" the clothing was dark, asymmetric, deliberately unfinished and entirely at odds with the glamour that dominated Paris fashion at the time. It was immediately recognised, despite that dismissal, as something new. Kawakubo's work operates as much in the register of art and philosophy as fashion: her collections challenge conventional ideas of the body, beauty, gender and what clothing is for, treating the garment as a conceptual object rather than a decorative one. The 2017 exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was only the second time in the museum's history that a living designer had been given a solo exhibition. Kawakubo founded Dover Street Market in London in 2004 with her husband and business partner Adrian Joffe, expanding globally to Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and beyond.