Comme des Garçons

Comme des Garçons ( Jap. コム·デ·ギャルソン , komu de gyaruson ) is a 1969 by Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo founded, internationally known avant-garde - fashion brand , high-priced under whose name clothing , accessories and perfumes are available for men and women .

The company, which positions itself as a niche brand in the international world of fashion, had sales of approximately $ 180 million in the mid-2000s and $ 300 million in 2017. The CEO is the Briton Adrian Joffe, husband of the company founder since 1992.

Company history

Comme des Garçons flagship store in Aoyama, Tokyo

The brand was introduced in 1969 by the then stylist Rei Kawakubo and the company was founded in 1973 as KK Comme des Garçons ( 株式会社コムデギャルソン , Kabushiki kaisha Komu de Gyaruson ) in Minato (Tokyo) .

The French expression comme des garçons means “like boys ”. Although the name suggests that men's and boys' fashion is produced, a men's line was not introduced until 1978 after women's fashion. To this day, the use of French expressions is popular in Japan, especially in the field of fashion, although it is speculated that Kawakubo chose the name for the deliberate androgyny of her designs and borrowed it from the song Tous les garçons et les filles (1962) by Françoise Hardy .

Comme des Garçons made its debut in Paris in 1981 and opened a boutique there that same year . A French branch ( Comme des Garçons SA ) was founded in 1982 and is based on Place Vendôme . From 1988 Rei Kawakubo published the magazine "Six" twice a year for a few years. It mainly contained photos and pictures. The first perfume was launched in 1994 in collaboration with the Spanish Puig Group, and so far over 40 fragrances have been created. Rei Kawakubo has always been the sole owner of her fashion brand.

Apart from a few unusual print campaigns, the company does almost no advertising , even though the Icelandic singer Björk , for example, has already worked as a model for Comme des Garçons. The French fashion designer Simon Porte Jacquemus worked as a salesman in the Parisian CDG boutique for a few years in the early 2010s to finance his own fashion brand.

The fashion

The first prêt-à-porter collections shown in Paris in the early 1980s were a scandal and attracted a lot of media attention. Critics described the collections as a "post-atomic scrap look", "Hiroshima chic" and "Quasimodo style". A so-called "aesthetics of poverty" would be shown: dresses littered with holes that looked as if they had been eaten by moths , misshapen frocks held in place by ropes instead of belts , skirts made of tattered strips of fabric and the models' disheveled hair . The collections, which were perceived as radical, were kept in dark colors. In contrast to western fashion, Comme des Garçons broke away from the female silhouette and brought completely new forms into fashion, contradicting the ideal of beauty prevailing in 1981 and exposing the image of women created by society as artificial. The later fashion style of the 1980s was decisively shaped by the innovative ideas of Rei Kawakubo and despite all the criticism , some of the stylistic devices used were found in the following seasons with other designers. Another important collection by Comme des Garçons , the spring collection from 1997, showed dresses that were so heavily padded that bulges and humps were shown. Kawakubo wanted to use it to explore volume and space. The protuberances on the back should symbolize the unity of the wearer with the burden of everyday life, for example a rucksack , and padding on the sleeves should imitate the typical posture of mobile phone users . For autumn / winter 2012, Kawakubo showed a collection of flat, flat two-dimensional clothes, with which something new should be created based on something simple. Critics interpreted these drafts, for example, as a satire on the increasingly flattening Internet society.

Recurring motifs at Comme des Garçons are the color black (although colored elements have been increasingly used since the late 1980s), the deconstructivist visualization of seams and hems , several consecutive layers of fabric, asymmetrical shirt or jacket lengths, and various dotted patterns since the early 1990s ("polka dots"), pieces of clothing with patches or pattern pieces, fabrics that appear intentionally old or used , dhoti- like trousers and sometimes a sparseness of the designs corresponding to Japanese modesty, but which can also have playful frills .

Kawakubo has been referred to by the press as the " high priestess of avant-garde fashion " for her unusual and intellectually sophisticated creations, or as the " Mona Lisa of fashion " because of the many interpretations that her designs allow . Comme des Garçons opposes the commercialization of fashion. Experts suspect that the brand could have had similar commercial success as Gucci if more emphasis had been placed on mass compatibility. But Rei Kawakubo herself says that she is dissatisfied with any collection that people like immediately because she then has to assume that she has not challenged the viewer enough. Accordingly, the designer tries “[ every season ] to create radically new pieces of clothing , shapes that no one has seen before. ”, With the aim of blurring the“ contact zone between body shape and clothing ”.

The designers and Kawakubo students Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara have been designing the “Comme des Garçons” main line since the 1990s, but also sell sub-brands under the same name. Especially under Watanabe's direction, Comme des Garçons has over the years u. a. cooperates with Levi's , Speedo , Vivienne Westwood and Fred Perry .

In autumn 2008, Comme des Garçons launched a low-priced collection for H&M as part of the Swedish fashion house's designer collaborations, which was sold out in a short time. In addition to women's and men's clothing, a unisex fragrance was also on offer.

In 2015, Comme des Garcons designed the "Chuck Taylor 70s" together with Converse . These were sold in limited numbers internationally in Converse's online shop for $ 135. The sneaker was sold again in limited numbers in the Converse online shop in 2018 and 2019.

In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), directed by curator Andrew Bolon , showed 140 women's models designed by Kawakubo between 1969 and 2017 as part of the exhibition Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons Art of the In-Between .

Collections

created by Rei Kawakubo:

Comme des Garçons - avant-garde main line for women (from 1973)
- Comme des Garçons Noir - predominantly black women's collection (from 1987)
Comme des Garçons Comme Des Garçons - (also: 'Comme Comme') second line of women's fashion (from 1993)
Comme des Garçons Homme Plus - progressive clothing line for men (from 1984)
- Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Sport - sporty version of the main men's line
- Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Evergreen - relaunched classics of the men's main line (from 2005, now discontinued)
Comme des Garçons Homme Deux - men's second line with classic ready-made clothing and accessories (from 1987)
Comme des Garçons SHIRT - casual, often colorful sportswear collection (from 1988)
- Comme des Garçons SHIRT boy (s) - sportswear presented for the younger target group since 2018
PLAY Comme des Garçons - youthful sportswear collection with red heart logo by New York graphic artist Filip Pagowski, from 2002
BLACK Comme des Garçons - lower-priced branch line with CDG classics as a reaction to the global economic crisis, own boutiques in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul (from 2009)

created by Junya Watanabe:

Comme des Garçons Homme - classic men's line (from 1978)
Comme des Garçons Robe de Chambre - Japanese women's line (merged into Comme Comme in 2004)
Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons - unconventional women's fashion (from 1992)
Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons Man - men's fashion with Americana - and workers' clothing styles (from 2001)
- Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons Man Pink - Men's Fashion for Women (discontinued)
eye Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons Man - sportswear collection, often in collaboration with other clothing brands (now discontinued)

created by Tao Kurihara:

Tricot Comme des Garçons - women's knitwear
Tao Comme des Garçons - women's fashion (from 2005 to 2011)

Others:

noir Kei Minomiya - Avant-garde women's fashion launched in 2012 with a focus on black and white, designed by CDG clothing technician Kei Minomiya
Gosha Rubchinskiy - Streetwear brand designed by Russian photographer Gosha Rubchinsky from 2012 and owned by CDG Group (scaled back in 2018)
Ganryu Comme des Garçons - unisex streetwear by Fumito Ganryu in Japan, a former assistant to Watanabe (from 2008, no longer part of the CDG Group since 2019)
DSM label - sportswear collection for the company's own Dover Street Market boutique in London
CDG - streetwear fashion with logo prints launched to mark the company's 45th anniversary in 2018 , its own online shop

Special divisions:

Comme des Garçons Edited - special items for the Edited boutiques in Japan
Comme des Garçons Speedo - swimwear with the manufacturer Speedo, also under the PLAY Comme des Garçons label
Comme des Garçons Pearl - jewelry (from 2006)
Comme des Garçons Parfum - numerous perfume creations for CDG (from 1994)
Comme des Garçons Parfum PARFUM - Perfume creations for other brands
Comme des Garçons Wallet - Small leather goods
Comme des Garçons Underwear - underwear collection

Perfumes

Since 1994, Comme des Garçons Parfums SA , based in Paris, has been producing a range of ( unisex ) fragrances in collaboration with the German perfumer Mark Buxton . The sometimes unconventional fragrances from Comme des Garçons are referred to by Rei Kawakubo himself as "non-parfums", as they are supposed to be reminiscent of different cultures, memories and everyday situations. The license partner of Comme des Garçons Parfums is the Spanish Puig Beauty & Fashion Group.

Boutiques

Dover Street Market in Dover Street, London (until 2016)

Comme des Garçons has its own stores around the world, for example in London, Paris, New York City and Tokyo. Not all shops carry the full range, some boutiques are limited to individual sub-brands. Clothes are presented there like (art) objects, not like goods. The fashion is part of an overall concept. Such was Comme des Garçons , the first fashion brand to a store of architects was designed to match the collection. The CDG flagship store in Aoyama, inaugurated in 1999, was designed with the architect Takao Kawasaki and Future Systems . This idea found many imitators, e.g. B. Prada or Louis Vuitton , which led Rei Kawakubo to abandon this concept again. Instead, so-called “guerrilla stores” were created from 2004; Temporary, mostly Spartan shops that stayed in the same, often unconventional location for only one year and then closed. CDG's first guerrilla store was opened in 2004 in collaboration with architecture student Christian Weinecke and designer Lil Schlichting-Stegemann in the former Bertolt Brecht bookstore in Berlin . Further guerrilla stores with a limited range were opened for one year each in Barcelona, Warsaw, Singapore, Hong Kong, Reykjavík, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Glasgow, Cologne, Basel, Athens, Krakow, Los Angeles, The Hague and Beirut.

In 2004 the company's own “Dover Street Market” (DSM) was opened in London's Dover Street. In this department store, the fashion is presented on market stalls or in shops-in-shops. Other, high-priced designer brands can also offer their fashion here alongside the Comme des Garçons collections. In 2016 the DSM moved to a larger location in London's Haymarket. Further Dover Street Markets were subsequently opened in Tokyo (2012), Manhattan (2013), Los Angeles (2019), Singapore (2017) and Beijing (2018, as a successor to the IT Market Beijing (I.TMB ) opened in 2010 ). There is a perfume boutique in Paris under the name Dover Street Market.

Since 2008, CDG has also had small 'pocket' stores around the world in which the Play collection and accessories are sold, for example in Paris, New York, Bangkok, Singapore, several in South Korea and pocket shops-in-shops in department stores like Galeries Lafayette , Lotte or Holt Renfrew (Canada). In 2012, the brand's first German flagship store opened its doors in Berlin. The Berlin branch has had an official online shop for German-speaking countries since 2020.