COMME des GARÇONS x Artek Is Pleasantly Normal
This year, COMME des GARÇONS covered clothing, collaborations, and kicks but that's not enough for the Japanese label: it just dropped a collection of furniture and bags to ring in the holiday season.
Designed in collaboration with Finnish-Korean company Artek, the line of wooden stools and chairs (¥93,500-¥275k or about $800-$2,400) launched earlier this month at eight of COMME des GARÇONS' largest Japanese stores, offering fans a rare chance to own CdG seats.
See, COMME des GARÇONS makes a lot of stuff but it doesn't make a lot of home goods so stuff like this is pretty unusual.
Aside from a couple conjoined chairs, this line-up is pretty standard fare, especially for a COMME des GARÇONS project. I'd imagine CdG doing, I dunno, some kind of inverted recliner that's arbitrarily challenging but, to be fair, this line was designed with holiday gifting in mind.
Some are laden with graffiti-like scribbling, others come with cushions fitted with Lochcarron tartan — plaid is a CdG signature — and there's even a three-way Disney collab, indicative of CdG's deep love for The House of Mouse.
Homeware may be uncommon for CdG, but it's fairly well-trodden ground for the label's founder. Rei Kawakubo designed furniture for CdG stores and sheer experimentation over the years, though these pieces were hardly ever conventionally sold.
Though the Artek collab is far from the COMME des GARÇONS' wildest Christmas capsule — that'd be CdG's new Chrome Hearts collab, probably — the resulting seats are indeed expensive.
If those prices prove prohibitive for Japanese shoppers, COMME des GARÇONS also cooked up a collection of revamped bags and backpacks to accompany the furniture, loading the accessories up with extra straps, keychains, and contrasting white text ripped from iconic CdG slogans: "MY ENERGY COMES FROM FREEDOM" and "LIVE FREE DIE STRONG."
