Breaking the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s Fashion Manifesto

Abstract

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is an anomaly in fashion’s celebrity-designer, brand-driven world. Intensely private, she rarely gives interviews; instead she expects those wanting to understand her work to look at the clothing itself. So, when she released a “creative manifesto” that offered insight into the Comme des Garçons spring/summer 2014 collection, it made an impression. In the manifesto, Kawakubo claimed to “break the idea of ‘clothes’”, and, certainly, the accompanying collection, Not Making Clothing (spring/summer 2014), represented a new degree of abstraction in the designer’s repertoire that was then amplified in following collections. Bypassing the common response to explain away Kawakubo’s work as art, anti-fashion or a refusal of fashion, in this article the author approaches the manifesto itself as one of Kawakubo’s “works”. Pulling at its threads to unravel the seams of the text, the author begins with its “making” and weaves in and out of the history of the fashion manifesto to compare Kawakubo’s work with the fashion manifestos of the Futurist artists Giacomma Balla and Volt. The author then comes back to the clothes themselves. In breaking the idea of clothes, the author argues, Kawakubo puts into doubt what we take for granted, changing what clothes signify and intensifying the normal work of fashion.