Garçons, Ghosts & Geometry: Rei Kawakubo’s Eerie Elegance at Comme des Garçons

In the often polished, calculated realm of high fashion, Rei Kawakubo stands as a formidable enigma. The Japanese designer, founder of the avant-garde powerhouse Comme des Garçons, defies fashion’s linear narrative. Comme Des Garcons Her collections do not conform to the idea of wearability, trend, or even seasonal cohesion. Instead, Kawakubo crafts conceptual performances, blurring the lines between garment, sculpture, and philosophical inquiry. She traffics not in trends but in questions—deep, at times disorienting questions about the body, identity, and the strange architecture of emotion.

From her earliest days disrupting Paris Fashion Week in the early 1980s with monochrome asymmetry and shredded fabrics, Kawakubo has maintained an almost ghostly detachment from industry norms. Her clothes are often anti-fashion, and yet they define fashion. The brand name itself—Comme des Garçons, or “like boys”—is a poetic misdirection, offering a glimpse into her lifelong exploration of androgyny, absence, and the reformation of human form.

A Designer Who Thinks in Shadows

Rei Kawakubo does not merely design clothes; she builds paradoxes. Where most designers embrace the body as canvas, Kawakubo treats it as interference. She bends the silhouette, manipulates proportions, and wraps the figure in shapes that resemble tumors, cocoons, or architectural interventions. Her aesthetic, both eerie and oddly elegant, tends to manifest through clothing that feels like it came from another dimension—one where beauty is synonymous with discomfort, tension, and restraint.

Take, for instance, her 1997 "Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body" collection. It featured foam-stuffed lumps that jutted out from the hips and shoulders, creating bizarre contours that baffled critics. The public dubbed them “lumps and bumps,” yet Kawakubo insisted they were not intended to be grotesque but rather to question the tyranny of symmetry. In her world, the deformed is not defective—it’s divine.

Ghostliness is a recurring presence in her work. Collections often feel haunted by absence—of gender, of identity, of resolution. Her models walk like apparitions, their faces obscured by veils or pale makeup, their bodies hidden inside bulbous garments that blur the line between presence and disappearance. This isn’t costume or theatricality; it’s philosophical camouflage. Kawakubo once said, “The future is in the past.” Perhaps, in her world, the future is also a ghost.

Geometry of the Unseen

What sets Comme des Garçons apart from nearly every other fashion house is Kawakubo’s architectural thinking. She sculpts garments as one might design a building—through geometry, space, and void. The silhouette is rarely about fit; it’s about volume and void, intrusion and exclusion. Her use of irregular shapes, folds, and cutouts transforms the human figure into a kind of living topography.

Geometry is not just a visual device in her collections—it’s a statement of intent. Angles and curves conflict with the human body in ways that create new realities. A jacket may jut out at ninety degrees; a dress might envelop the wearer like a concrete facade. Kawakubo, however, isn’t interested in mere shock. She’s interested in what happens when the language of clothing is dismantled and reassembled with logic foreign to the fashion lexicon. Geometry becomes a metaphor for emotional architecture: how we build barriers, form identities, or collapse inward.

An Anti-Fashion Philosophy

Comme des Garçons has always stood at odds with conventional luxury. Where most high-end brands revel in glamour, embellishment, and seasonal buzz, Kawakubo constructs a world that’s resistant to categorization. The brand’s flagship stores, particularly the cult Dover Street Market locations, feel more like experimental galleries than commercial spaces. There is no runway spectacle for the sake of spectacle; each show is a profound and often cryptic meditation.

Her approach to fashion is deeply rooted in anti-commercialism, despite Comme des Garçons being a highly successful global brand. It’s a contradiction she embraces. She creates what shouldn’t sell, and yet it does. She rejects trends, and yet she inspires them. Her refusal to conform has created a kind of sacred space in fashion—an island of introspection amid an ocean of consumption.

There’s also a fierce independence in how Kawakubo operates. She rarely grants interviews and speaks cryptically when she does. She refuses to explain her collections, believing that interpretation belongs to the audience. Even her long-time collaborators admit to working around her silence. Her genius, then, is not in dictating meaning but in allowing space for it to be found. Like geometry itself, her work provides form without narrative.

Feminism in the Abstract

In a world that constantly polices women’s appearances, Rei Kawakubo’s vision is nothing short of radical. She does not dress women to be attractive, desirable, or even legible. Her silhouettes obscure the body, rather than flatter it. She removes the burden of being seen and instead invites the wearer to be felt—as concept, as energy, as ghost.

In doing so, she offers a quiet, potent feminism. It’s not the loud feminism of slogans or protest tees; it’s the kind that erodes systems by refusing to participate in them. Kawakubo’s clothing strips away the male gaze and reconstructs the wearer as an unknowable entity. Her garments do not seduce—they confront, repel, and ultimately liberate.

This disobedient beauty is part of what makes her work so enduring. It challenges us to rethink what clothing should do. It asks us whether we wear clothes to communicate, to shield, or to transform. For Kawakubo, fashion is not about adornment—it’s about disruption.

The Specter of Influence

Rei Kawakubo's influence permeates every corner of contemporary design, from Raf Simons to Thom Browne, from Lady Gaga’s costumes to the visual stylings of alternative pop stars. Her protégés—Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya among them—have carried her avant-garde ethos into new territories while retaining the DNA of rebellion.

Yet, Kawakubo herself remains singular. Her work doesn’t age; it hovers in an eternal now. Fashion, which is usually concerned with the moment, the next, the new, finds itself stilled by her creations. They don’t evolve—they rupture. They open space for silence in an industry addicted to noise.

Her 2017 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, was only the second time the Met gave a living designer a solo show (the first being Yves Saint Laurent). It was a monumental gesture, but in typical Kawakubo fashion, she offered no retrospective comfort. The exhibition refused a linear timeline. Instead, it floated in themes like “absence/presence,” “bound/unbound,” and “clothes/not clothes.”

Elegance in the Unknown

There’s something hauntingly elegant about Rei Kawakubo’s universe—a place where ghosts dwell, where garments float away from the body, Comme Des Garcons Long Sleeve and where geometry carves out emotional space. Comme des Garçons is not a brand. It’s a spirit, a philosophy, an aesthetic resistance.

In Kawakubo’s hands, fashion becomes a ghost story. Not one of horror, but of echoes, hauntings, and shapes left behind. She asks us to consider what’s missing, what’s hidden, and what lies between the seams. Her garments are not meant to be worn—they are meant to be witnessed.

And in that eerie witnessing, fashion becomes something else entirely. Something sacred. Something spectral. Something like elegance—strange, shapeless, and eternal.