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In the world of high fashion, where beauty is often defined by symmetry, luxury, and trend conformity, few designers have managed to defy the system so consistently and radically as Rei Kawakubo, the enigmatic founder of Comme des Garçons. From her earliest shows in Paris in the 1980s to her conceptual explorations in recent years, Kawakubo has turned the runway into a site of provocation. But more than mere disruption, her work invites a deeper lens: Comme Des Garcons it echoes the chaos and rebellion of Dada, the early 20th-century avant-garde art movement that rejected logic and embraced absurdity. In this context, Comme des Garçons can be understood not simply as fashion but as a sustained performance of Dadaism—tailoring the absurd into wearable philosophy.
Rei Kawakubo launched Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969, but it was her 1981 debut in Paris that sent shockwaves through the fashion establishment. With her models clad in black, asymmetrical garments that looked ripped, burned, or unformed, Kawakubo was instantly dubbed a creator of “anti-fashion.” Critics were puzzled, some offended, and others captivated. There were no flattering silhouettes, no glamorous styling, no traditional notions of femininity. The New York Times called it a “Hiroshima chic,” while others likened her designs to costumes for the post-apocalypse.
This was more than avant-garde; it was a direct challenge to the foundations of Western beauty and fashion. Much like the Dadaists who emerged after World War I, rejecting bourgeois values, institutionalized art, and even language itself, Kawakubo was challenging the fashion industry’s obsession with aesthetic harmony, utility, and gender norms.
Dadaism was born in Zurich in 1916 in reaction to the senseless devastation of World War I. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, and Tristan Tzara sought to upend rationality and meaning itself. Through absurd performances, nonsensical poetry, and ready-made sculptures, they created a movement that celebrated randomness, satire, and provocation. The goal was not to please but to disturb, to awaken the senses through discomfort and confrontation.
Rei Kawakubo’s aesthetic similarly revels in the irrational. Her garments often look unfinished or unwearable, such as the 1997 “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” collection, nicknamed the “Lumps and Bumps” collection. Models walked the runway with unnatural padding inserted into their dresses, distorting the body into grotesque and alien shapes. These were not clothes for adornment but sculptures worn on flesh—just as Duchamp’s “Fountain” was not a urinal but an attack on what art could be.
Comme des Garçons collections often employ techniques that would traditionally be considered mistakes: inside-out seams, frayed edges, disproportions, and intentionally “ugly” compositions. Kawakubo once stated, “For something to be beautiful, it doesn’t have to be pretty.” This echoes the Dadaist spirit of tearing down preconceived notions of aesthetics in order to rebuild something more authentic, more challenging, and more in touch with the chaotic pulse of the time.
Comme des Garçons fashion shows are not mere presentations of seasonal trends—they are full-blown conceptual performances. The music, lighting, model choreography, and even the audience experience are part of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total artwork,” a term used by the Dadaists to describe multi-disciplinary acts of rebellion. Each collection has a theme that pushes the viewer to engage intellectually, emotionally, and philosophically.
In her 2017 Met Gala exhibit titled “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” the designer blurred the line between fashion and installation art. Her pieces were shown not as functional garments but as standalone objects of abstraction, placed in stark, surreal environments. This mirrored the Dadaists’ exhibitions where context, rather than content, provoked meaning. Kawakubo does not explain her work in detail, leaving space for interpretation and confusion, which is a hallmark of both performance art and Dada.
Her 2014 “Not Making Clothing” collection is perhaps the most direct expression of this ideology. The show featured massive, unstructured forms draped over the human body—dresses that bore no resemblance to traditional apparel. By denying fashion’s basic premise of making wearable clothing, Kawakubo engaged in a form of protest not unlike Dada’s embrace of the nonsensical.
Another central tenet of Dada was the dismantling of fixed identity, particularly gender identity. The Dadaists were known for their playful androgyny, collage identities, and fluid presentations of self. Kawakubo, too, has made gender ambiguity a core part of her fashion language. Comme des Garçons often showcases clothing that deliberately obscures the shape of the body, erasing traditional markers of masculinity and femininity.
She has designed for both men and women in ways that make the binary distinctions irrelevant, with tailored suits for women that defy conventional power dressing and dresses for men that reject the masculine silhouette. This subversion of gender echoes the Dadaist goal of unmaking the structures that define us—not through overt ideology but through playful and poetic contradiction.
There is an ironic tension between Comme des Garçons as a Dada-like performance and its commercial success. The brand runs a vast retail empire, including the influential Dover Street Market boutiques in London, Tokyo, New York, and other cities. Collaborations with Nike, Supreme, and even IKEA might seem antithetical to a brand rooted in subversion.
Yet even here, the absurdity can be viewed as performative. Kawakubo has never been anti-commerce; rather, she embeds contradiction within the commercial. Dover Street Market itself is curated like an art space, blurring the boundaries between installation and retail. It forces the consumer into an unfamiliar position, much like Dada’s own relationship to galleries and museums—mocking them while infiltrating them.
Rei Kawakubo’s contribution to fashion cannot be confined to style or innovation. She has cultivated a language of resistance through form, concept, and execution. Comme Des Garcons Converse Her work invites confusion and curiosity, asking us to look again, to think more deeply, and to let go of the security that beauty and fashion so often promise.
Comme des Garçons, like Dada, thrives in the in-between—between fashion and art, chaos and form, absurdity and meaning. It tailors the absurd not to mock fashion but to reveal its deepest assumptions and invite us to rebuild it anew.
In this sense, Comme des Garçons is not just a fashion brand. It is a Dadaist performance that never ends, unfolding season after season in a theater of the absurd where clothes are not just garments but questions, provocations, and poems stitched in fabric.
