Given Kawakubo’s fearless, avant-garde approach to design and business, her tie-up with H&M was bound to produce more bristling than the retailer’s previous joint-label ventures with Roberto Cavalli, Stella McCartney and Karl Lagerfeld. “What’s interesting about collaborations is the possibility for one plus one to equal three,” Kawakubo says, warming up to the topic. “It’s interesting for me to sell Comme des Garçons in places it’s never been sold before, to people who might not have heard of Comme des Garçons.” Not that she ever approaches such a project as a brainstorming or a meeting of the minds. It’s more the case of a willful designer making a strong proposition with a partner who brings something new to the table, like production know-how or distribution muscle. A recent example is the elite Fastskin LZR Racer swimsuit for Speedo, for which Comme des Garçons created graphics while Speedo crafted the suits, billed as the fastest ever; this claim proved controversial. “For me there’s no compromise,”the designer says. “I do what I want, and they do whatever I couldn’t do myself.”
Kawakubo is a consummate fashion indie, designing collections and running her business on her own terms since she launched her label in Tokyo in 1969. If she wants blistering punk rock or no music at all at her fashion show, or if she feels like showing skirts and no tops one season, so be it. She always begins with the concept, with little regard for the commercial consequences. (And incidentally, her infamous pillow collection that distorted various body parts with assorted lumps and bumps “wasn’t a best-seller, no,” she concedes.) “Our business is creation,” she says, now fidgeting with a pair of black sunglasses. “I couldn’t begin to do anything if the first thing I thought about was the selling of it.” Kawakubo allows that Play Comme des Garçons, a line of T-shirts, polos and cardigans that she introduced in 2002, is very commercial, yet “the starting point was not to sell a lot of it. The starting point of this concept of Play was that it’s not designed—even that was a concept.”
At its headquarters in Stockholm, H&M starts each business day with a much different set of priorities, given that the retail giant operates more than 1,500 stores—stocked with 100 percent lump-free clothes—in 29 countries. Yet its customers will get a taste of deconstruction come November. Van den Bosch, an H&M consultant who helmed the design department for 30 years and masterminded its designer projects, is a longtime fan of Kawakubo, lauding her “unisex attitude toward fashion” and her “mix between elegant and quite sporty” clothes. Not coincidentally, the Kawakubo collection will arrive in stores just as H&M plants its first outlets in Japan: one in Ginza, another in hypertrendy Harajuku and a third coming next year in Shibuya. “She’s really respected by people in Japan,” says van den Bosch, a woman of few words with a penchant for dark clothing, much like Kawakubo. “They’ll be really happy about this collaboration.” For the rest of the world, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons are hardly household names, but neither were Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren of Viktor & Rolf, guest designers for H&M’s 2006 holiday promotion. “It makes our brand stronger by doing surprising things and different things, and we also get different customers in the shop,” van den Bosch says. As for the clothing, regardless of a few exposed seams and some boiled wool, “it’s not difficult in itself for our customers,” she says. “The collection looks really great.”
