Comme des Garçons

Japanese fashion label started and owned by fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Her asymmetrical, seemingly shapeless designs combine Eastern and Western ideas of clothing. They are often sombre in colour and sometimes torn and crumpled.

Kawakubo became a freelance designer in 1966, after working in a Japanese textile company, and formed Comme des Garçons in 1973. In the early 1980s her avant-garde designs received acclaim in Paris and were widely influential. She continued to question conventions in fashion and produced outfits turned inside out, with unpicked seams, slashed hems, and distorted shapes.