u/MetonymFashionYT

While doing research for a future video I found this incredible interview for '93SS Homme Plus. Not a lot of people know about this; Rei usually doesn't say much to Western journalists, but at one point she was much more forthcoming to Japanese media.

There's a lot of nuggets of insights on how she designs from the tailoring tradition, how she thinks men should dress, and how she works with black. She doesn't think men should wear all-black.

And a lot of her ideas for Homme Plus has changed since '93!

Read on Substack (with more in-line images)

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Originally from Elle Japan’s 1993 issue. Text by Kuniko Terada and photos by Tom Watson. Translated with machine assistance with some editing for accuracy.

>"Intuitively, you know how there are just people who share the same values. It makes me happy when people like that wear my clothes." — Rei Kawakubo

In 1969, she began making and selling women's clothing under the name Comme des Garçons. In 1973, Comme des Garçons Co., Ltd. was founded.

In 1976, she launched the men's line, Comme des Garçons Homme.

"I started menswear for two reasons. The first was simply that, as a business at the time, we needed a second brand alongside the women's line. And when we asked ourselves what to do, what I most wanted to do right then was put forward our own Comme des Garçons take on men's clothes. That's how Homme started. Back then the streets, especially around Harajuku, were full of horribly overdesigned things, and it bothered me to see men wearing them. I felt strongly that men shouldn't be dressing like that.

At the same time, there was what people called the 'sewer rat' look, the standard office uniform for men, which was of course what almost everyone wore. As for the clothes meant as a kind of self-assertion against it, I felt those too missed the point."

When Homme launched, she proposed a stark white dress shirt that had been put through a wash. Washed garments are taken for granted now, but at the time they struck everyone as something fresh. The shirt became a huge hit and almost overnight put the Comme des Garçons Homme name on the map. It also laid the groundwork for the brand's now celebrated shirtmaking.

Another novel move was deliberately steering clear of professional models in the catalogs and using amateurs instead. The catalogs produced between 1980 and 1990 featured, one after another: poets Ryuichi Tamura and Gozo Yoshimasu; painters Hisao Domoto and Isamu Wakabayashi; art director Ura Murakoshi; film director Toshiya Fujita; industrial designer Masayuki Kurokawa; and from New York, artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, de Kooning, George Segal, and Ed Ruscha. Well-known figures from fields you'd think had nothing to do with fashion took their turn in front of the camera, sometimes shy, sometimes at ease. There was a warmth to seeing them there, and it loosened the fixed ideas people had about what fashion was supposed to be.

In 1981, she launched two new women's brands, held her first Paris show and exhibition, and began exporting. The following year, the company joined France's Haute Couture and Prêt-à-Porter federation and opened a subsidiary and a directly run store in Paris.

Six years after the birth of Comme des Garçons Homme, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus was founded.

"Building each brand always brings business problems with it. On top of that, the idea was to have a brand where we could make things with a bit more freedom. I think that's where it came from.

Thanks to a lot of people, Homme's sales just kept climbing. But the more they climbed, the more pressure built up in the opposite direction. You couldn't take risks anymore, because you had to protect what you'd built. So in that sense the thinking was, fine, let's have a smaller brand where we can do exactly what we want."

The first Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection, for Spring/Summer 1985, was shown not in Tokyo but at the Paris office.

"Part of the reason was that it was hard to find models in Japan, and part of it was that men's fashion shows weren't really being asked for the way they are now. The demand for men's trends, for something new in menswear, just wasn't very strong. When we started out, the place to do it really was Paris."

As with the Homme catalogs, the models who appear in the Homme Plus collections are amateurs rather than professionals.

"With men's fashion, when a man expresses himself, the clothes themselves matter, of course. But underneath it all there has to be something you'd call character: the individuality, the personality the person carries. Only then does a man's look really hold together. That's how I felt. And to find people like that, I figured someone who'd lived and done a lot of different things was the right choice. So I had the clothes worn by people who, even if they weren't models by trade, had real individuality of their own."

Over eight years, twice a year, the Homme Plus collections have drawn a stellar lineup from around the world: the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi; actors John Malkovich, Julian Sands, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Matt Dillon, Rodney Grant; and musicians including Don Cherry, John Lurie, and John Cale.

Every one of them said yes without hesitation. (Metonym note: They were only paid flight tickets and lodging!) That too must be connected to the fact that over these eight years Comme des Garçons Homme Plus has earned worldwide recognition and built a solid standing. And at the root of it is surely the steady, uncompromising approach to making things held by its designer, Rei Kawakubo.

She doesn't pander to the consumer; she makes what she wants to make. She drives the values she's found to their conclusion and refuses to let go of them. She keeps putting forward new forms. That stance is probably what other creators respond to and feel in tune with.

So what is it exactly about Homme Plus that has won it fans around the world?

Unlike women's wear, with menswear you can't just do anything you want.

"The basic elements of tailoring, those I don't touch. The shoulders, the sleeves, I leave those alone too.

What I do change is mainly the fabric. And by fabric I mean the basic menswear materials, the ones that have traditionally been used in men's clothing. Those I change wholesale. Not by adding embroidery on top or anything like that, but by taking a basic men's fabric and changing it at the root.

It's a game of fine adjustments, of making a difference through one or two techniques. Things like enlarging a collar or lowering the gorge line, that kind of fiddling I don't like. If I'm going to change something, I don't want to change just one part in isolation. I'd rather change the overall balance. Reshaping just the collar, sticking a pocket or some unusual element onto the front panel, rather than that sort of fiddling, I prefer changing larger areas: the balance of front panel against back, or sleeves against body. That much is true. The range of things you can change in menswear is pretty limited, you know, and I think that's just how it ends up.

The V-zone is the same. There's a settled position where the proportions look most beautiful. There was a time where I played with it, but in the end, it's the position men have been wearing for hundreds, even thousands of years. That's what it always comes back to..."

(MN: This interview, conducted in '93, is right after Rei's split from Yohji. A lot of her ideas about menswear tailoring at this point are in-line with Yohji's fascination with classical forms. Later she would destroy the suit in all the ways she said she wouldn't.)

Just hearing the words "Comme des Garçons," and black comes to mind. That's how strong the association is. She took black, until then a color reserved for weddings and funerals, and established it as fashion, settling it into the streets as a natural everyday color worn without a second thought in any season. Lately she's been especially fixated on that black and on fabric treatments.

"When something's clean and pretty, it somehow puts me off. I want clothes that, the first time you put them on, already feel like you've worn them once or twice. (MN: This is also a very Yohji thing!)

The washing keeps getting more extreme. It comes from the same impulse, really. What I keep wanting to push against is the assumption that 'brand-new and beautiful' is the obvious starting point for value. Because that sense of something new, of something beautiful, for me doesn't have to come only from washing or only from breaking down fabric. At any given moment there's some particular thing that holds value for me, and that's what I'm after.

And then at some point, when I suddenly feel I'm done with that value, I move on to the next one. In that sense, the breaking down of fabric is something I'm still in the middle of. (MN: In the same year she would debut her famous shrunken wool)

I do want to stop, honestly. But I can't quit black either. It's the same problem.

In terms of cycles, I keep thinking it must be time to be done with black already. People don't want it anymore, the next cycle has to be about to start. But in the end, black sells. About black, I can only say one thing: I like it. It's very easy to wear and very easy to design with. By easy I mean I'm being helped along by its strength.

It's a very useful color. And it really is strong. Even watching people heading home from a formal occasion, I look at them and think, that's beautiful."

Make it black. Then ruin it. She can't quite let go of that feeling of age settling into something. "A black with a clean, beautiful sense of material might be too harsh for men. Even for women, a worn-in black is better. By that I mean the texture, the expression of the surface itself, a black that looks worn in.

For men, I'd like black to be worn in, not new. And as a general rule, rather than head-to-toe black, half-black might be better. Black with navy, or black with gray. Or black in different materials, top and bottom."

In 1986, a subsidiary was established in New York, and a directly run Homme Plus store opened in Paris. In 1987, under the banner of "the Japanese suit," Comme des Garçons Homme Deux was founded. It's a brand of suits only, in sizes S, M, L, and LL, sold with jacket and trousers separated.

The waist has almost no shaping and there are no vents. The trousers always have pleats.

"This may just be my own personal sense of things, but I do think there's a way Japanese people look their best, especially when a man has to wear a particular kind of uniform.

Take the same person, in other clothes versus in Homme Deux, and to me it's obvious: he looks more handsome in Homme Deux. That's just how I see it. And the clothes that do that are Homme Deux.

I felt that designers' eyes hadn't been turning to the suit. It struck me as overlooked territory. Designing, putting ideas forward, the visual side isn't the whole job. The less flashy areas are exactly where design, in the broader sense, is needed."

In 1988, she founded Comme des Garçons Shirt, produced in France, and in 1991 entered a license agreement with the French firm JANS, her only licensee.

"Even though we call it a licensee, it's a long way from what people usually mean by the word. It's almost as if we do it ourselves. We handle everything from the sketches, we specify the fabrics, we check the samples. All they're handling is the sewing."

For every brand she checks even the retail outlets, all the way down to whether they match that brand's image and target, and then acts on it. She also starts shop design from the concept stage. The Aoyama store, now entering its fourth year in February, was launched as "a store always in motion."

She isn't just making clothes. She catches the currents in society faster than anyone and never stops taking on the next challenge. She's a person with possibilities beyond imagining.