COMME DES GARÇONS

Founded by Rei Kawakubo in 1969, Comme des Garcons (French for “like the boys”) became a womenswear company in 1973. Becoming popular in Japan throughout the 1970s, in 1978 she introduced Comme des Garcons Homme. In 1981, along with Yohji Yamamoto, she showed in Paris where her distressed fabrics, unfinished hems, asymmetrical designs mostly in monochrome, spawned a genre known as deconstruction. For her SS97 titled “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body”, fitted garments were fused with lumpen protrusions which radically changed the wearer’s silhouette. In 1984, she launched Comme des Garcons Homme Plus, which was more design focused than Homme. The Comme des Garcons’ company has many lines and brands and sells both fashion and perfumes. In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of the brands work entitled “Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garcons, Art of the In-Between”.