Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo, the world's most famous fashion designer, founded Comme des Garçons. The designer worked as a freelancer in Tokyo and Paris before founding her own boutique in Tokyo in 1973.

Kawakubo is known for questioning fashion, society, and herself, resulting in a one-of-a-kind design that deconstructs itself at times. Many consider the high fashion designer to be a fashion icon, but she disagrees. Her clothes were intended to provide a daring interpretation of comfort, particularly for women; the suggestion was that her designs did not seek masculine acceptance or gaze.

Kawakubo, a conceptual artist at heart, has consistently startled and impressed an international audience with her abstract creations. She has defied convention to redefine fashion for nearly five decades. Her designs have reframed concepts of beauty and created a new relationship between body and dress by subverting garment structure and function. In her quest to design clothes that "didn't exist before," Kawakubo has disassembled the lexicon of clothing in order to reimagine it.

Her work remains some of the most meaningful on the runway today as she continues to push the boundaries of dress. Rei Kawakubo's iconoclastic and uncompromising style has altered our expectations of fashion. She has achieved artistic and financial success by prioritizing intellectual concepts as well as procedures, and she has influenced future generations of designers around the world.

Born: 1942
Nationality: Japanese
Brand: Comme de Garçons