Rei Kawakubo: Thinking Ugliness, Dying Beauty

 

Rei Kawakubo never touched a sewing machine in college. She studied philosophy and fine arts while the rest of the world learned to draw patterns and obey the rules of good taste. She founded Comme des Garçons in 1969 not because she wanted to design clothes, but because the clothes that existed felt too small to contain what she imagined. Her principle was simple and devastating: every garment must contain an unanswered question. Not a style. Not a trend. A question that unsettles.

Paris, 1981. The models walk the runway dressed in black, wrapped in shapeless fabrics that seem to crumble over their bodies. No curves. No seduction. Nothing the Western eye recognizes as desirable. The audience laughs nervously. Someone in the front row whispers, “they look like beggars.” The French press, with its usual mix of sadism and panic, calls it Hiroshima chic. Kawakubo doesn’t blink. She didn’t come to please; she came to short-circuit the entire system. Instead of structured jackets, she showed hole-ridden sweaters. Instead of elegant skirts, collapsing fabrics. Her message echoed Bakhtin’s writings on the grotesque: renewal doesn’t emerge from academic beauty but from the expanded, overflowing body, free from imposed order. The West calls that ugliness. Kawakubo calls it the future.

Comme des Garçons isn’t a clothing brand. It’s an aesthetic manifesto, a silent act of war against the idea that bodies must look a certain way to deserve attention. Kawakubo doesn’t sketch or think in mannequins; she works with fragments, broken molds, remains. She builds mobile sculptures meant to be worn. Her clothes don’t beautify, they think. With Kawakubo was born “a posthuman aesthetic: when fashion stops beautifying and begins to think.” Every seam is a dialogue. Every fold, a philosophical argument. While British punk in the ’70s screamed no future through distorted guitars, she translated it into no form with scissors and pins. Kawakubo’s punk doesn’t sound, it is seen. It needs no amplifiers, only silence and confrontation.

In 1997, her dresses featured strange bulges, soft prosthetics that distorted the body’s natural proportions. Critics called them monstrous. She called them new. In a culture obsessed with thinness, symmetry, and linearity, her notion of the grotesque became a radical gesture of self-love: a body refusing to fit the mold. By inflating, twisting, or disfiguring the outline, Kawakubo doesn’t dehumanize, she liberates. Derrida wrote that deconstruction doesn’t destroy but exposes what the system hides. That’s what Kawakubo does with Western tailoring: she dismantles the suit not to deny it, but to reveal its ideological skeleton. A Comme des Garçons jacket might have a sleeve sewn inside out, a mismatched lapel, or a visible seam where industrial neatness should reign. Every apparent mistake is a statement: form is ideology, and unsewing it means disarming the power it exerts over the body.

“The West dresses to show; we dress to hide.” Kawakubo doesn’t hide, she reconfigures. She reveals that every garment is a text, and reading it means looking at its edges, not its surface. In Japan, there’s the concept of wabi-sabi: finding beauty in imperfection, serenity in the incomplete. Kawakubo practices it without naming it. Her collections seem built on the ruins of Western desire. No symmetry, no order, no complacency. Yet there is an odd peace: a broken harmony that fascinates because chaos finds its own liturgy. The grotesque becomes sublime. Punk becomes elegant. Destruction is not rage, it’s purification: breaking in order to see again.

Comme des Garçons’ expansion in the ’80s came through unexpected collaborations with Nike, Supreme, and Louis Vuitton. Dover Street Market, her retail concept, operates like an anti shopping mall, a permanent conceptual art installation. Each garment, each display, is a suspended question: what happens when luxury stops being aspirational and becomes experimental? “I wanted a market where old and new, expensive and cheap, beautiful and grotesque could coexist without hierarchy,” she once explained. The dressed body isn’t neutral, it communicates class, gender, desire, obedience. Kawakubo knows this and uses it as a language of dissent. Everything in Comme des Garçons is political, even when it looks abstract. John Waters, the legendary independent filmmaker and celebrated godfather of bad taste, named her his favorite designer. Not by accident.

Her influence reverberates today in Balenciaga, Rick Owens, Vetements, and in an entire generation that sees ugliness as a form of truth. In times of hyperconsumption and algorithms dictating what a desirable body should look like, Comme des Garçons remains a fissure, a space where the body escapes digital tyranny. “What interests me,” Kawakubo once said, “is what doesn’t yet exist.” And there lies her power: in refusing to confirm what we already know about ourselves. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated an entire exhibition to her, only the second living designer to receive that honor after Yves Saint Laurent. A visitor enters and stops before an impossible dress: a cloud of white tulle inflated into nameless shapes. They don’t know whether it’s fashion or sculpture, whether to admire it or laugh. They stay still. That hesitation, that instant of aesthetic vertigo, is Rei Kawakubo’s triumph. Her work confronts us with the possibility that fashion is not adornment but thought. Her beauty doesn’t flatter, it unsettles. And that discomfort is her raw material, her declaration of war, her way of saying that perfection was always the biggest lie we were sold.