Rei Kawakubo did not train as a designer. She studied fine arts and literature at Keio University in Tokyo, graduated in 1964, and worked in advertising for a textile company before beginning to make clothes. She founded Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969 and showed in Paris for the first time in April 1981. The reviews used the words "Hiroshima chic," "post-atomic," and "poverty chic." Within three years the collection had sold out in thirty-two countries.

The Break

The 1982 Destroy Lace collection — black, asymmetric, deliberately torn, with visible construction and loose threads — is the most-cited show in late-twentieth-century fashion criticism. It disputed, in a single presentation, every proposition of postwar Paris couture: that clothing should fit, that seams should be concealed, that beauty required symmetry.

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I work in three shades of black. — Rei Kawakubo

She rarely gives interviews; when she does, she speaks in sentences of six or eight words. The published record of her stated intentions is thin. What remains is the collection archive.

Lumps & Bumps

The 1997 spring collection, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, consisted of dresses padded in goose-down quilts at the hips, shoulders, and back, distorting the female silhouette into shapes the body does not ordinarily take. The collection was read as an argument about the arbitrariness of standards of beauty.

Dover Street Market

Kawakubo's second major act, in the 2000s, was curatorial. She founded Dover Street Market in London in 2004, a multi-brand concept store that has expanded to Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Paris. DSM is the single most influential platform for avant-garde fashion retail of the last two decades.

The Met

In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum mounted Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, the first solo exhibition of a living designer since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. The show attracted 550,000 visitors. Kawakubo did not attend the opening gala. She continues to present two collections a year, each with a deliberately opaque statement. She is the subject of more ongoing graduate dissertations than any living designer.