A War on Symmetry: Comme des Garçons and the New Order of Silhouettes

A War on Symmetry: Comme des Garçons and the New Order of Silhouettes

Blog Article

In the realm of high fashion, the name Comme des Garçons evokes a visceral response. Revered for its intellectual rigor and radical design ethos, the Japanese fashion label led by Rei Kawakubo has done more than just challenge conventions—it has dismantled them.Comme Des Garcons Over the past four decades, Comme des Garçons has staged a relentless war on symmetry, formality, and traditional notions of beauty. But it is in the realm of silhouette where the brand has most powerfully rewritten the rules. Here, we explore how Comme des Garçons reshaped the landscape of contemporary fashion by declaring open war on symmetry, birthing a new order of silhouettes in its wake.

The Origin of Dissonance

When Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in 1969, few could have predicted that her vision would so profoundly destabilize the architecture of clothing. Her early collections shocked Western critics and audiences. Dubbed "Hiroshima chic" by a less-than-appreciative Western press in the early 1980s, her pieces rejected tailoring, embraced black, and reimagined garments as art objects rather than flattering adornments.

At the heart of her aesthetic was an inherent distrust of balance and proportion. Instead of creating garments that flattered the body, she wrapped, obscured, and exaggerated it. Shoulders might jut out at odd angles; a sleeve might appear only on one side; a skirt might balloon into a sculptural mass. This was not fashion for ornamentation. It was fashion as philosophy, as rebellion, as critique.

Silhouette as Language

For most of fashion’s history, the silhouette was a silent servant to cultural ideals. It either celebrated or subjugated the body, depending on the times. Corsets constricted, shoulder pads empowered, and waists were cinched to signify control. But Kawakubo’s silhouettes had no interest in such subtext. They were loud, sometimes grotesque, and often startlingly asymmetric. Through them, she built a new language—one that questioned what a garment could or should do.

The turning point came with her 1997 collection, “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body.” This show introduced bulbous lumps and pads inserted into gingham dresses in ways that distorted the wearer’s body into alien forms. The silhouettes created were at once feminine and monstrous, soft yet unsettling. Fashion critics and audiences alike were forced to reckon with garments that resisted legibility. This was not about symmetry or style. It was about the freedom to redefine beauty from the margins.

Breaking the Grid

Symmetry in clothing is comfort. It suggests balance, order, and classical aesthetics. Kawakubo’s genius was to unmoor fashion from that comfort. In doing so, she aligned with broader postmodern movements in art and architecture, which similarly challenged structural hierarchy and the idea of universal taste. She broke the grid, both metaphorically and literally. A shirt might be twisted, a jacket might be doubled in one shoulder but absent on the other, and trousers might dissolve into cascades of asymmetrical drapery.

This defiance wasn't simply ornamental. It carried deep philosophical resonance. To break symmetry was to resist the binary logic that governed so much of modern life: male/female, beautiful/ugly, wearable/unwearable. Her silhouettes offered a radical third space, one where ambiguity reigned and the human form could be reimagined endlessly.

A Sculptural Turn

In the 2010s, Comme des Garçons embraced an increasingly sculptural direction. Collections ceased to function as wearables and instead became ambulatory sculptures. The 2014 “Not Making Clothes” collection made this explicit. The garments had no sleeves, no openings, and no discernible functional purpose. They enveloped the models in voluminous masses, transforming them into walking installations.

This shift marked the evolution of Kawakubo's war on symmetry into something more existential. She wasn’t just challenging fashion norms; she was questioning the nature of fashion itself. What is a dress if it cannot be worn? What is beauty if it cannot be defined? And crucially, what does it mean to rebel not only against culture but against one’s own medium?

Influence and Legacy

Today, Kawakubo’s influence can be felt across the fashion industry. Designers like Rick Owens, Yohji Yamamoto, Iris van Herpen, and Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga have all, in various ways, taken cues from her radical use of silhouette. The asymmetrical, distorted, and voluminous have entered the mainstream—not as shock tactics but as accepted avenues of artistic expression in fashion.

Yet, even as the world slowly catches up, Comme des Garçons continues to push forward, never content to rest in its own shadow. Each season brings new provocations, new constructions, and new silhouettes that confound the eye and challenge the mind. The brand’s ongoing resistance to commercialization—despite its global success—remains one of its defining strengths.

A Fashion of Ideas

To understand the significance of Kawakubo’s silhouettes, one must grasp that they are not mere garments—they are ideas. In her world, fashion is a medium of communication as potent as any painting or poem. And what she communicates, time and again, is the power of negation: the refusal to conform, the courage to destroy beauty in order to find something more profound beneath it.

Her silhouettes are not pleasing in the traditional sense. They do not flatter the body, but instead challenge our attachment to physical form. They are avatars of abstraction. They force us to reconsider how we move through the world and how we allow ourselves to be seen. They ask us to imagine a world where symmetry is not a requirement but an option.

Conclusion: The Beauty of Unevenness

In a cultural climate obsessed with perfection, harmony, and filtered aesthetics, the work of Comme des Garçons remains a vital counterpoint. It reminds us that beauty does not reside in the expected, the balanced, or the symmetric. Rather, it is often found in the strange bulges of a Comme Des Garcons Converse padded dress, the off-kilter hem of a lopsided coat, or the jarring interruption of form in a sculptural garment.

Rei Kawakubo’s war on symmetry is, in the end, a battle for freedom. Freedom from tradition, from norms, from the tyranny of beauty as it has long been defined. Her silhouettes do not conform—they expand. They do not decorate—they provoke. And in doing so, they open up new terrains for what fashion can be: not merely the art of the body, but the art of the possible.

Report this page