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Always a leader, never a follower: Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçon still paves the way for Japanese fashion designers.

Rei Kawakubo did not train as a fashion designer. Instead, she studied art and literature at Keio University in Tokyo, which is perhaps why she questions the very codes fashion has been defined by.

As the creative director of Comme des Garçons, Kawakubo is often referred to as the world’s most influential living fashion designer. She made her debut in Paris in 1981, then followed in 1982 with a collection aptly named Destroy, as she would go on to subvert all fashion conventions by consistently challenging established notions of beauty. Destroy, for example, featured tattered, asymmetrical and holey garments in an entirely new aesthetic, still sewn by hand using haute couture techniques.

Kawakubo was soon so famous that her black-clad fans were dubbed “the crows” by the Japanese press, but the designer told the

New Yorker in 2005 that she “never intended to start a revolution”: she only wanted to show “what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”

While Destroy was confronting to many – it was hailed as a new “aesthetic of poverty” – it paled in shock value compared to Kawakubo’s 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, which was otherwise known as “lumps and bumps”. The collection featured models in simple gingham dresses with padding in the wrong places to create hunchbacks, swollen hips and other growths on the body. The point was to question existing conventions of beauty such as symmetry and perfect proportion, which Kawakubo has done consistently since founding Comme des Garçons in 1969. Today, she is the creative director of a global empire turning over $220 million a year with over 20 distinct lines, and is also the co-founder of the Dover Street Market chain of international concept stores.

Throughout her career Kawakubo has been renowned for nurturing other designers, in particular Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara, and has inspired numerous fashion designers, including Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang and Ann Demeulemeester. “My approach is simple,” she once told

Interview magazine. “It is nothing other than what I am thinking at the time I make each piece of clothing, whether I think it is strong and beautiful. The result is something that other people decide.”