Comme des Garcons Chair No.1 Rei Kawakubo Pallucco

Rare COMME des GARÇONS Chair No. 1, designed by Rei Kawakubo for Pallucco Srl in Rome, Italy, embod­ies the avant-garde spirit that defined her work in both fashion and design. Produced in yellow zinc-plated steel with a steel-wire seat, this sculp­tural chair blurs the line between furni­ture and art, merging indus­trial mate­ri­als with uncompromising minimalism.

Created in 1983 – 1984, Chair No. 1 formed part of Kawakubo’s early explo­ration into furni­ture design — objects orig­i­nally conceived to furnish Comme des Garçons boutiques world­wide. Each piece was produced in limited numbers, reflect­ing the same concep­tual rigor and defi­ance of conven­tion that char­ac­ter­ized her cloth­ing designs. This example, numbered #20075, repre­sents one of the rare surviv­ing early editions from that period.

The chair’s stark, struc­tural form captures Kawakubo’s inter­est in reduc­tion and raw mate­r­ial honesty. The grid seat and exposed welded frame convey both strength and fragility, while the yellow zinc finish adds a lumi­nous, unex­pected warmth to an other­wise austere silhou­ette. Its delib­er­ate tension between utility and discom­fort chal­lenges tradi­tional notions of domes­tic design, posi­tion­ing it closer to sculp­ture than to functional furniture.

Today, Chair No. 1 is recog­nized as a seminal work of 1980s design — an emblem of Rei Kawakubo’s cross-disci­pli­nary vision and the radical creativ­ity of Comme des Garçons. Highly sought after by collec­tors, it stands as a rare arti­fact from a pivotal moment when fashion, art, and indus­trial design began to inter­sect in new and provocative ways.