This story originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Vogue Australia.
In an unremarkable office building, stripped bare during renovations in Paris’s Montparnasse, guests hurried inside. An autumn downpour claimed some of the crowd without umbrellas, but their haste had much more to do with the impending spring/summer 2026 Comme des Garçons show. In contrast to the frenzy, the brand’s staff calmly greeted people individually at the door, among them Adrian Joffe, the label’s president and husband to the woman of the hour Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons’s creative director.
As the show commenced, models in Kawakubo’s creations were let loose, floating onto the stage to acapella vocals of Spanish experimental singer Fátima Miranda. The first was like an undulating, cocooning column that opened like a giant clam to a jolting slice of Comme des Garçons red. Then came hessian and openwork crochet, calico and cotton enclosed forms, some tied in gargantuan knots. Other looks appeared like stacked cushions in domestic fabrics: upholstery and seed sacks, lace doilies and cotton—a humble, honest jumble in tender shades of pink. It gave the feel of personal belongings gathered and bundled in haste in a dystopian future, fitting for a collection named After The Dust. One look was made up of columns, like giant rolled-up table linen or carpet, one askew and cantilevering from a model’s shoulder like a third arm. A bulbous form encircled another’s torso, its raw hem flipped to reveal an interior membrane the color of strawberry milk. Then a pause. Near complete stillness descended before a trio of finale dresses appeared, each paired with headpieces like flattened papal mitres sitting askance, so tall models had to gently dip their heads under a ceiling beam.
The effect was, as always with Kawakubo, potent, beguiling and not immediately comprehensible. Since the Japanese-born creative began showing in Paris in 1981, Kawakubo-san, as her staff call her, and her shows have been subject to more scrutiny, obsession and citation than that of most other designers, living or dead.
Back then, she shocked the establishment with her disruptive black looks—an affront to the glamour-obsessed ’80s—at the InterContinental. Both then and now, she refuses to justify her work and rarely explains it. Instead, she has earned enviable levels of respect and industry-wide deference, bordering on near-mythic veneration. Kawakubo now leads an empire that includes more than 200 stores, including one in Melbourne, 17 sub-labels—many led by Kawakubo protégées like Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya—and high-concept, multi-brand boutique Dover Street Market, the first of which opened in 2004.
The inscrutable quality of her work can be experienced first-hand at a joint retrospective of her creations and those of the late Vivienne Westwood at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) exhibition Westwood | Kawakubo, opening this month. An Australian first, it will feature an unprecedented number of Kawakubo’s garments in this country, including nearly all of the 45 looks gifted by the label. There will be more than 140 designs from both designers on display sourced from the NGV Collection and loaned from London’s Victoria Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among others. Fashion students, casual fashion followers and seasoned industry insiders alike will have the rare chance to get up close to Kawakubo’s runway designs from legendary collections like 1997’s Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body.
In Paris, details of her work fans hunger for (the label offers little) were revealed after the show by Comme des Garçons staff at the brand’s Paris headquarters in Place Vendôme (the other is in Tokyo). In a long and low showroom, they revealed how the sense of happenstance and imperfection is, of course, meticulously crafted. Everything was made perfectly before being washed, in line with Kawakubo’s line of inquiry for this collection. “I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from the damaging of perfect things,” she shared in a show note.
Kawakubo, alongside Joffe, was in the room, unassuming but unmistakable with her severe bob and head-to-toe black ensemble of a jacket and signature skirt. Buyers and press re-examined the looks, all aware of her quiet presence. At the centre of the room, each look correlated to a rack of clothing alongside—these more accessible but no less inventive interpretations will be available in stores. Blazers, for example, are crafted in hessian with double sleeves, while a seemingly threadbare knit with open holes mimics hessian in hue but not fabrication.
The knit is reminiscent of a black jumper with gaping holes from one of the designer’s first collections in Paris in 1982. She initially presented it after transitioning from showing in Tokyo, where she was better known, 12 years after founding the label. What some saw as decay she described as lace. “To me they’re not tears,” she said at the time. “Those are openings that give the fabric another dimension. The cut-out might be considered another form of lace.”
This exemplifies her contrarian spirit, one that is innately punk, a sensibility she has in common with Westwood. It’s something she believes resonates in her work, as she shares in a rare interview with Vogue Australia. “Punk represents a rebellious spirit, which means to fight,” she says. “And I believe the best way to fight is through creation. That is why I always say my energy comes from my freedom and a rebellious spirit.”
For Kawakubo, who grew up in conservative post-war Japan, radical defiance has been a defining force in her career. This spirit is evident in collections such as Blood and Roses, spring/summer 2015, and Anger for autumn/winter ’24/’25, of which she said, “I have anger against everything in the world.” Both collections will feature in the NGV exhibition.
Her refusal to accept norms has been crucial to her success, even if it has made the designer and her world feel unapproachable and inexorable at times. For instance, Kawakubo oversees every detail in her idiosyncratic stores, which, with their roving, maze-like spaces, don’t adhere to conventional floor plans. Her largest retrospective, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, saw her exhaustively construct a to-scale model of the final New York space in Tokyo. Nothing escapes Kawakubo-san’s excoriating eye, from the materials used in shelves to the use of color. If some privately question her changes, they come to realise that “of course she is right”, as one employee expressed. No music is played in the brand’s boutiques and each has an assigned color—Paris is red, Tokyo blue, New York green. Some are deliberately hard to find and seldom display actual clothes in the windows, bucking every rule of retail.
Despite this, she has built a global empire bringing in hundreds of millions each year, and has attracted a devoted following unlike any other fashion house. Transcending boundaries and borders is a Kawakubo speciality. In her autumn/winter ’16/’17 collection, 18th-Century Punk, she flipped crinolines inside out and upside down, cutting openings in them to create ma—the Japanese concept of empty space—so their construction was laid bare on the outside. She reworked Lyon silks into articulated components like a delicate/strong suit of armor, or cut them up into countless 3D petals.
For Smaller is Stronger, autumn/winter ’25/’26, she set upon a men’s pinstripe suit, deforming it and recasting it on women. Conventional notions of beauty, gender, social mores, nationality and class, she has said, are “irrelevant” to her world.
Among the solemnity and erudition, however, many miss distinctly Comme des Garçons characteristics: joy and humor. Logos are not very Comme, but the Play line is instantly recognisable for its red heart by artist Filip Pagowski. The brand’s Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré store was originally hidden down not one but two courtyards, embodying a wry humor and encouraging a sense of discovery. When Kawakubo saw the reception she received in Paris, she resolved to claim a place for herself in the most famous of shopping squares: Place Vendôme. Today she is here, one of the few non-French designers and founder of one of the few non-European labels. Kawakubo is having the last laugh.
As the world gets darker, people turn to renegades like Kawakubo as a source of guidance on how to respond. Of late, she has held an unexpected role as fashion hope-giver. For Uncertain Future, spring/summer 2025, cartoonish bell-shaped skirts, like gorgeously twisted whips of cream, were presented alongside tiered, stretched shapes resembling cakes with royal icing and prints visible through gauzy mesh. Levity and lightness. “With the state of the world as it is, the future as uncertain as it is, if you put air and transparency into the mix of things, there could be the possibility of hope,” she shared at the time. Once again, she wouldn’t allow herself to be easily pegged, avoiding the expected and easily understood in a society hellbent on mass consumption. “Comme des Garçons is not in the business of making things that everyone understands,” Kawakubo says. “Whether what I make sells well or not is not the primary goal. People may think making new things every time is risky, but for me it is not a risk. Playing it safe and avoiding risks is what I think is risky for Comme des Garçons. I hope that might be the influence that people might feel.”
Her fearlessness is also an example to others. “The most constant aim is trying to make something new, trying not to look at the past,” she says. “And it is incessant, because if you take break from creation, you go backwards.” For, Return to the Source, autumn/winter ’23/’24, she sought a clean slate, imagining what it would be like if we began the world again. This idea of creating from nothing is one of her primary methods of sparking originality. “Every single time, I start from zero, from inside my head, not only with making clothes but also in all aspects of Comme des Garçons,” she explains. “The external world, of course, can enter the process along the way.”
Kawakubo’s mode of creation, and part of the reason she is indomitable, is her relentlessness. It’s a process she describes as “imposing”. “New values can only be found inside oneself, and I am often thinking, no it is not this, and no it is not that. The process inevitably is extremely difficult, but this searching is the most vital part of this process I have imposed upon myself. It is the basis of everything I do.” Kawakubo has said before she suffers every time she creates.
The intensity and personal nature of this process is an invitation to connect deeply to the seemingly elusive designer. The intimacy of the feelings imbued in her clothing makes sense of the very close connections and strong response people feel in relation to it. There is a generosity in this.
Happily, for fashion, the devotion is reciprocal. As enigmatic as Kawakubo is, she can be counted on for an indefatigable willingness to create and fashion the new, however costly it is to its singular stoic maker. “I want to find things I haven’t done or made before. And I cannot easily be satisfied with what I find,” she says. “The search is continuous and satisfaction is a luxury I cannot afford.”
Unstoppable Kawakubo. A category she fits. Restless Kawakubo. “Without something new there cannot be any progress,” she says. “Creation is what takes us forward. This pursuit is the foundation I built the whole company on.” Nearly six decades in, we will all hurry to see whatever she does next.
Westwood | Kawakubo opens at the National Gallery of Victoria with the NGV Gala on December 6, before opening to the public on December 7.