Ensemble

Since founding Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo has consistently defined and redefined the aesthetics of her time. Collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body. This ensemble from Kawakubo’s fall/winter 1983–84 collection, “Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats” exemplifies the designer’s work after 1979, when she abandoned her previous references and decided to “start from zero,” or to create clothes never seen before in fashion. The collection, among her first presented to Western audiences in Paris, featured outsized silhouettes, asymmetrical, wrapped construction, and fabric appendages. Though the collection was primarily black, it included solid blue and blue-and-white plaid fabrics inspired by traditional Japanese aizome, or indigo-dyed fabric. The use of blue references the influence of Japanese folkloric dress in Kawakubo's early work.