COMME DES GARCONS

The arrival of Rei Kawakubo in Paris in the early Eighties ushered in a look that went against every established fashion notion that prevailed then. While the likes of Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler were amping up colour, blowing up shoulders, cinching waists and chopping off hemlines, Kawakubo—and later a cohort of her fellow Japanese designers—presented silhouettes that were strange and misshapen to the European eye, rendered in sombre, monochromatic black. In the decades since, Kawakubo has, through her work at Comme des Garçons, questioned and erased the boundaries between fashion and art, male and female, past and present, garment and sculpture. Her latest collection sees leopard print laid over camo, corduroys worn with silk fringe, and pyjamas hybridised with fetish leathers.