Coat

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 “Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats” collection 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 featured outsized silhouettes, asymmetrical, wrapped construction, and fabric appendages. This coat, one of a series made in heavyweight knit and felted wool with false rips and tears, recalls the durability and overuse of traditional Japanese workwear.