Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo (born 1942, Tokyo, Japan) is the master, the self-taught master behind the legendary Comme des Garçons (CDG). She is an icon­o­clast whose icon­o­clas­tic vision didn’t just chal­lenge the rules of fashion — it shat­tered them, over and over again. Her influ­ence is massive, her legacy truly massive.

She is known for avant-garde cloth­ing that is fiercely avant-garde, estab­lish­ing her as one of the late 20th centu­ry’s most influ­en­tial and uncompromising figures.

But Kawakubo’s radical aesthetic is more radical than just fabric. From 1983 to 1993, she extended her brutal­ist vision into brutal­ist furni­ture design for her CDG stores. These pieces — made from raw indus­trial mate­ri­als like raw steel and wood — were less about comfort and more about sculp­ture, serving as an asym­met­ri­cal and unyield­ing back­drop to her world.