Rei Kawakubo Transforms Tokyo With Comme des Garçons SS26
And then there are designers that make clothes and then there are designers that make you feel something that you may not be able to name. The remover of the second type – the rare type, is Rei Kawakubo. When she presented the COMME des GARÇONS Homme Plus SS26 installation in the legendary Aoyama store in Tokyo it was not a simple seasonal installation. It was a statement. A provocation. A revolution without words dressed in cloth and space.
Going into that installation, you are not merely looking at items in a rack. You are in something more of a world than that–a world which Kawakubo has been painstakingly, obsessively re-creating over a fifty-year period.
A Space That Feels Like a Dream, Not a Store
The Commes des Garcons Aoyama store has never been the typical retail store. It was considered, as any collections of Kawakubo, to have always appeared to me more of a gallery than of a shop. But even the SS26 installation brought that feeling a step further.
Space was changed, not painted, but changed. There is a difference. Decoration is the addition of things into a room. Transformation transforms the meaning of the room. And that is just what Kawakubo did. The Aoyama store looked like a continuation of the soul of the collection up to the point where one could not help but pull away the clothing or the surroundings it was in. And this is what rei kawakubo comme des garcons has always been about – complete vision, complete commitment, nothing held back.
Those who were there have said it was disorienting in the most positive sense. As though it were getting out of time a couple of minutes. Just like fashion, but not fashion.
Rei Kawakubo’s Vision — Always Ahead, Never Explained
The most captivating part about Rei Kawakubo is the fact that she seldom talks about her work. She does not sit down to lengthy interviews which disembowel the meaning of each silhouette or why she chose to use a particular texture. She allows the work to speak – and somehow it always speaks.
Her rei kawakubo clothing has never been about dressing up people in the traditional way. Asking questions has been a worrying issue. What is the meaning of shoulder? When you remove the seams, what do people expect? What would you do? What is beauty when you remove everything that society has taught you on what beauty should be? These are not the questions which are easy to respond to and Kawakubo has never offered easy answers.
This is precisely the reason why her work is relevant. Fashion is here and gone, but an actual question remains with you.
Why COMME des GARÇONS Homme Plus SS26 Feels Different
In the fashion world, everyone eagerly awaits to find out what Kawakubo will do next. And every season she has been able to surprise not by seeking something new but by exploring more in her own vision. The SS26 collection was particularly intimate, particularly raw, Homme Plus.
Something in the way in which each piece was made would have made me think that it was created to suit a particular type of person, a person who is comfortable with contradiction, a person who does not need his or her clothes to make him/her clear to the world. The weight of the clothes was not in the literal meaning of the word but in the emotional meaning of the word. You looked at them and there was something that appeared to alter.
And this is what rei kawakubo cdg label has never ever sold its soul to for commercial ease. As the other half of the industry zigged, Kawakubo zagged. As others made things simple, she made things complex. And the production, year after year, is work that really counts.
Aoyama, Tokyo — The Perfect Stage for an Imperfect World
Tokyo is a city that is acquainted with contradiction. It is ultramodern and at the same time so traditional. It does not lose the memory of the past and it embraces the future. It is the ideal home to the brand, which has always dwelled in the area between the opposing notions.
This is particularly applicable to the Aoyama neighborhood which has quite an unexcited sophistication. Neither is it loud and flashy. It is conceived, plotted, advanced – and yet it is full of surprises when you dig deep enough. It is a revelation of the soul of the work of Kawakubo nearly perfectly.
Having the SS26 installation here was not a chance. Kawakubo has never been unresponsive to circumstance, to where her work breathes and lives. Aoyama also wanted the collection room to have its own rhythm, without the din and the circus of the fashion weeks in other cities.
What This Installation Tells Us About Fashion’s Future
An increasing debate in the fashion industry is what the industry is about. Is it entertainment? Commerce? Art? Culture? All these things and more at once is what most brands are trying to achieve and they find themselves doing none of them particularly well. That has never been an issue with Kawakubo, in that she has always known precisely what she is creating and the reasons why.
The SS26 installation serves to remind that fashion can be at its best a mode of communication. It deals with a more profound level than aesthetics. It is sensuous identity, memory, uneasiness, lust. It questions you to give a second thought to what you might have assumed you were familiar with.
It is the tradition that rei kawakubo comme des garcons art of the in between that led so powerfully into focus, that extraordinary 2017 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that explored the space between binaries. Among the male and the female. East-West. Fashion and not-fashion. The SS26 installation is the further extension of this spirit and serves to remind us that the most interesting things always occur between.
Why Rei Kawakubo Still Matters in 2026
It is almost subversive in the fact that Rei Kawakubo is still relevant in a world of quick fashion and computer-generated trends. She is not maximizing with respect to virality. It is not the algorithm that she is running after. She is not creating clothes to shoot well and indicate nothing when you turn your head.
She is doing what she has always done, following a highly personal vision with the same level of commitment, and the belief that the world will come round. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. And she keeps on going either this way or that way.
This integrity is hard to come by amongst designers in any industry but in fashion, it is practically non-existent. It is why her work is still being rediscovered by a new generation of designers, stylists and fashion lovers, and continues to provide the same shock of recognition – the feeling that someone, somewhere, is telling the truth.
It was not a seasonal one that the COMME des GARCONS Homme Plus SS26 installation in Tokyo. It was an ode to what fashion could be when it does not reduce itself. When it will not be easy or comfortable or understood at first.
All her career is devoted to the production of work in which more of you will be needed than you imagined to give. And it is worth it, somehow.
