Since its founding in 1969, the Japanese brand Comme des Garçons (CDG) has etched its name into fashion history, revolutionizing modern design by recontextualizing the relationship between a garment and its wearer.
The brand’s unique approach to shape, layering and accessorizing has led to hundreds of eccentrically brilliant runway looks across for men’s and women’s clothing alike and the success of the initial brand has led to the formation of over 20 diffusion lines and a retail universe unlike any other.
Unfortunately, CDG as a whole is plagued by a rather unique curse: popularity.
One of the diffusion lines, CDG PLAY, was founded in 2002 as “an antithesis of design,” covering basic styles of clothing typically not seen on a runway, most of them featuring the infamous heart logo with two eyes placed towards the top. The affordable and accessible designs that contrasted with most of the brand’s previous work resulted in a sharp increase in popularity for the PLAY line. This led to the now-ubiquitous collaboration with Converse that expands each year. PLAY, despite being around the 10th CDG diffusion line created, possesses the brand’s most easily recognizable line and logo.
In terms of sales, this is a blessing for the brand; the clothing produced for PLAY is very easy to mass-produce and long-term collaborations with Converse will never go out of style. However, for fashion enthusiasts, it hurts to see a brand with such a rich and innovative design history be overshadowed by PLAY, a line born from an ironic desire to contrast with the original brand.
What better reason, then, for a little profile of the brand to show everyone what they’ve missed out on? There’s certainly no shortage of history.
Founded by the legendary Rei Kawakubo in 1969, CDG didn’t officially display its first womenswear and menswear collections until 1973 and 1978, respectively. This was right around the emergence of what one could call the “Big Three” of Japanese designers: CDG, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto.
“Unfortunately, CDG as a whole is plagued by a rather unique curse: popularity.”
The emergence of the three brands and their Japanese influences contrasted heavily with the traditional Western design philosophy that dominated the runways at the time, earning Kawakubo racially-tinged criticism for collections like 1982’s “Destroy” — which featured ripped sweaters that critics called “Hiroshima chic” despite it being more akin to Vivienne Westwood than any other Japanese designer.
Kawakubo has experimented heavily with color (or lack thereof) and silhouette from her earliest days, elevating the roles of many other Japanese designers in her wake. Figures like Keiichi Tanaka, Kei Ninomiya, Tao Kurihara and Junya Watanabe have all risen to prominence at the brand. The latter three even have CDG diffusion lines under their own names, which only add to their notoriety.
Kawakubo’s influence doesn’t stop there, though; she briefly dated Yohji Yamamoto during the early 1980s and they showed their first collections in Paris together. Her current husband Adrian Joffe directs CDG PLAY and Dover Street Market, the ever-popular high-fashion department store with locations in Japan, Europe and the United States.
Aside from official CDG stores, which are often hole-in-the-wall locations with incredible layouts, Dover Street Market presents the largest selection of CDG of any store with 17 lines available including wallets and perfume. It’s truly a spectacle to witness so many different types of clothing represented in one space, especially since they each cater to different target audiences and design interests.
Among the diffusion lines, there’s CDG Homme, the original no-nonsense menswear line, CDG SHIRT, which delights in reformatting classic menswear via collaborations and patchwork themes and CDG BLACK, which features (you guessed it) mostly black clothing containing minor alterations to traditional themes.
Notably, not many women’s runway garments are sold in stores; that’s because Kawakubo’s mainline designs have remained just as out-of-the-box as they were when she started her career. They could probably just as easily be described as art pieces.
As a result, Kawakubo’s designs take significantly more time to make than traditional Western forms of clothing and are not easily replicable. CDG still makes plenty of clothes for women, including the CDG Girl line, but these runway pieces are produced over such a great length of time and in such little quantity that they’re not as readily available for consumption.
Interestingly, Kawakubo has stated that for the last 10 years, she has been focused not on designing clothes but on designing “objects for the body.” This explains why her recent work has been even more abstract than usual, stretching the notion of runway pieces from pieces not meant to be worn normally to pieces perhaps not meant to be worn at all.
Nevertheless, Kawakubo continues to innovate in her choice of materials and strange, fantastical twists on everyday items; in particular, CDG Homme’s SS24 collection features two pairs of derby footwear in collaboration with Kids Love Gaite that are quite literally two pairs of shoes molded together; one pair is stacked on top of each other and the other features one shoe protruding from the side of each of the others.
CDG has long embodied the countercultural ethos behind many high-fashion and streetwear brands alike and it doesn’t seem like the brand is going anywhere any time soon. Though — at 81 years young — Kawakubo is undoubtedly nearing the end of her career, she has clearly ensured that her legacy will be in good hands.
The goal of this article, then, is to ensure that that legacy goes down as more than just Converse with hearts on them.
Gus Gingrich PO ’24 is from Walnut Creek, California. In his free time, he enjoys stressing over being outbid on Japanese auction websites and mocking up re-designs for his dorm room closet.
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