Word: kawakubo
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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Yohji Yamamoto. Rei Kawakubo. Issey Miyake...
...fabric and works with a bolt of cloth like a sculptor with clay, not molding it into a presketched design but draping the whole length over a body, drawing the shape of the final garment from the fabric itself as it works in easy collaboration with the body. Rei Kawakubo, the most austere and cerebral of these new designers, speaks intensely about "getting down to the essence of shapelessness, formlessness and colorlessness." At first glance, her men's and women's clothes for Comme des Garçons (the name means "like the boys" and was chosen...
Yohji Yamamoto, whose wondrously simple cascades of fabric combine Kawakubo's seriousness and Miyake's ebullience, may say that "fashion is fashion. In the end I think that fashion should not be an art." But he also expects his clothes to have the social impact of some major masterwork. "If you want to wear these," he says, "then you must change your situation...
...force then. It was really more like a curiosity, and Yamamoto returned to Tokyo to spend the next three years with his mother, a dressmaker, turning out "very formfitting, terrible clothes for women whose money came from their husbands or boyfriends." At about this same time, Kawakubo, 40, a former advertising coordinator and stylist, was working out her own first fashion forays, which were almost painfully conventional reworkings of European-style peasant dresses and glitzy knits...
Every designer has to go through that same peeling process. Yamamoto and Kawakubo are in a sense just finishing up for themselves what Miyake passed through a few years before. Calling Miyake simply a forerunner is an almost careless understatement, like calling...