Between Angles and Absence: Comme des Garçons as Geometry and Ghost
In the sprawling landscape of contemporary fashion, few names evoke the same sense of myth, mastery, and mystery as Comme des Garons. Founded by Rei Kawakubo in 1969, the brand has never courted conventional beauty, Comme Des Garconscommercial trends, or traditional silhouettes. Instead, Comme des Garons has offered fashion as philosophya rigorous dismantling of form, identity, and presence. To understand its language is to stand between angles and absence, to inhabit spaces that feel at once geometric and ghostlike.
Rei Kawakubo: Architect of the Invisible
Rei Kawakubo is often described as elusive. She rarely speaks to the press, rarely explains her collections, and seems uninterested in fame. Yet the power of her work reverberates across every fashion week, every major museum show, and every designer's subconscious. Where most designers are content to create clothing, Kawakubo designs conceptssometimes sculptural, sometimes surreal, often cerebral, always radical.
From the start, she rejected the fashion establishments emphasis on figure-flattering design. In 1981, when Comme des Garons made its Paris debut, French critics recoiled. Her tattered, black, asymmetrical creations were described as Hiroshima chic. But what they saw as destruction, Kawakubo saw as liberationfrom expectations, from gender, from Eurocentric beauty standards. These garments were not about seduction or sophistication. They were about absence. The absence of adornment, the absence of symmetry, the absence of rules.
Geometry as Garment
If absence is one half of the Comme des Garons code, then geometry is the other. Kawakubos collections are mathematical poems. Shapes override anatomy. Angles refuse accommodation. A shoulder juts out like a shard of glass; a dress spirals in impossible directions; a coat transforms into an architectural puzzle. The body is no longer the canvas but a participant in spatial experimentation.
Geometry in her work is not decoration but defiance. In rejecting the contours of the human figure, Kawakubo asks us to reconsider our relationship with form. What happens when clothing refuses to fit? When it obstructs instead of enhances? When a silhouette becomes a question mark?
In her seminal 1997 collection, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, Kawakubo inserted bulges of padding at hips and shoulders, creating distorted, quasi-comedic forms. The garments were controversial, yet they captured something deeply human: the vulnerability of the body, the absurdity of perfection, the desire to be seen even in distortion. Geometry, in Kawakubos hands, is not cold or clinical. It is alive, shifting, uncanny.
The Ghost in the Fabric
While Comme des Garons is often discussed in terms of radical form, its spiritual dimension is less examined but equally vital. Kawakubos collections are haunted. There is a persistent spectral quality that floats through the seams. Whether it's a ruffled shadow of Victorian mourning or a transparent layer that conceals more than it reveals, her work engages with absence as presence.
This ghostliness is not theatrical but philosophical. It reflects a refusal to anchor fashion in the material world. The garments do not exist merely to be worn but to be contemplated. Kawakubo has said, I want to make clothes that have never been seen before. But what does it mean to make something unseen? Something that hovers just out of comprehension?
The 2015 collection titled Blood and Roses was a meditation on beauty and pain, with models appearing like romantic phantoms wrapped in felt and lace, eyes obscured, bodies enveloped in textile apparitions. It wasn't clear if they were saints, specters, or sculptures. In many ways, they were all three.
Comme des Garons doesnt stage fashion showsit holds sances. Each season conjures an aesthetic language born of memory, loss, speculation, and silence. We are not given answers, only hintslike a whisper caught in tulle.
Fashion Beyond Function
At the core of Comme des Garons is a provocation: What is fashion for? If it's merely to clothe, then her garments fail. They often restrict movement, ignore seasonal practicality, and eschew comfort. If its to attract, then they disrupt with awkward silhouettes and monochrome palettes. But if fashion is a languagean abstract expression of culture, critique, and emotionthen Comme des Garons speaks volumes.
Kawakubo once stated, The meaning is that there is no meaning. This declaration is not nihilism but liberation. It frees fashion from narrative, from usefulness, from marketing logic. Like abstract art or experimental music, her work invites subjective interpretation. It is not fashion to be consumed but confronted.
Her refusal to explain collections is part of this ethos. Comme des Garons demands that the viewer meet the work halfway. You must look. You must feel. You must wonder. The clothes do not flatter or conform; they challenge, they disturb, they transcend.
Influence as Echo
Despite its avant-garde position, Comme des Garons has cast a massive shadow over the global fashion industry. Designers from Martin Margiela to Craig Green, from Yohji Yamamoto to Iris van Herpen, owe spiritual debts to Kawakubo. Her proteges, including Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya, continue to explore the boundaries she first shattered.
Even fast fashion brands have mimicked her silhouettes, stripping them of their meaning but revealing just how potent her influence is. In museums, her pieces are displayed like relics. In academic circles, they are dissected like texts. Comme des Garons has not just changed fashion; it has rewritten its grammar.
The Space Between
To understand Comme des Garons is not to decode but to dwellin ambiguity, in silence, in contradiction. Comme Des Garcons Hoodie Kawakubo operates in the space between angles and absence, between body and garment, presence and disappearance. Her work resists consumption. It is not about owning a piece but entering a world.
In the end, Comme des Garons offers us an invitation: to rethink what we wear and why we wear it. To consider not just how we appear but how we disappear. To see fashion not as object, but as apparition. Geometry and ghost, structure and spiritwoven together in black thread and untold stories.
As long as Rei Kawakubo continues to create, we will continue to question. And in that questioning, we may find something rare in fashiona moment of genuine mystery.
