Clothes That Argue

Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969 with no formal fashion training.

Her 1981 Paris show was black, distressed, asymmetric, full of holes. Critics reached for language nobody would use now, and the general verdict was somewhere between incomprehension and hostility.

Work that provokes that reaction is either a failure or the beginning of a new vocabulary, and nobody can tell which at the time, including the designer. What is clear in retrospect is that she never adjusted. Fifty years later the work is still difficult on purpose.

The strategic case for difficulty is worth making properly, because it sounds like an artistic indulgence and it is not.

Agreement is not the goal. Clothes designed to be immediately likeable compete against every other likeable thing, on price and availability, in a market with enormous production capacity. Clothes designed to provoke a reaction select for people who feel strongly, and a small fiercely committed audience sustains a career for decades in a way a large indifferent one never does.

Her line about working in three shades of black is the same idea applied to her own process. Removing colour removes an entire dimension of decision-making, which forces everything to happen in shape, proportion and texture. That is where her argument lives, so the constraint protects it from being diluted by an easier route to interest.

But the part almost nobody studies is the business structure underneath, and it is the most useful thing in this chapter for anybody who wants a long career.

The difficult collections do not fund themselves. They are funded by accessible lines and by fragrance, which sell in volume, at prices ordinary people pay, to customers who may never see a runway. The famous shape is the commercial one. The commercial layer exists so that the uncompromised work does not have to compromise to survive.

Then Dover Street Market, which extended the same idea into retail. A store arranged as a chaotic marketplace, where her most difficult pieces sit beside brands she chose. It turned selection itself into a product, gave the group a commercial platform it controlled, and did for her what Kith did from the opposite direction: made taste the thing being sold.

The lesson generalises, and young designers almost never take it.

Decide in advance which part of your output is the argument and which part pays for the argument. Protect the first with the second, deliberately, from the beginning.

The alternative is what usually happens instead: compromising the work in order to fund the work, one small reasonable concession per season, until several years later there is nothing left that was worth protecting and nobody can remember what the brand was originally for. That is the difference between a fifty-year career and a beautiful first collection.