COMME DES GARÇONS

COMME DES GARÇONS

COMME DES GARÇONS presents on the official calendar as one of the most intellectually radical houses in fashion history. Founded in Tokyo in 1969 by designer Rei Kawakubo, the house made its now-legendary Paris debut in 1981 alongside Yohji Yamamoto, presenting deliberately deconstructed, asymmetrical, predominantly black garments that shocked an industry accustomed to body-conscious Western tailoring — a moment widely regarded as one of the most significant ruptures in postwar fashion history, sometimes described by critics at the time as “Hiroshima chic,” a characterization Kawakubo herself has firmly rejected. 

Kawakubo has spent the subsequent four decades treating each collection as a genuine conceptual inquiry — into beauty, gender, the body’s relationship to fabric, and fashion’s own systems and conventions — rather than a seasonal commercial exercise, building a reputation as one of the only living designers regularly discussed in the same breath as visual artists rather than simply fashion figures. Comme des Garçons has also built the enormously successful, far more accessible PLAY diffusion line, and Kawakubo has nurtured independent creative talent under the CDG umbrella, including Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya, both showing elsewhere on this same Paris calendar. 

For S/S 2027, COMME DES GARÇONS presents on the official schedule continuing over five decades of treating fashion as a genuine site of philosophical inquiry — a body of work still regularly cited as among the most influential in the medium’s modern history.

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