Why COMME des GARÇONS' Single Most Classic Garment Is Also Its Most Divisive
COMME des GARÇONS and Lewis Leathers' painted black leather riders jackets are only loosely indicative of the CdG worldview. And yet, perhaps because of that exact reason, they've become one of CdG's most classic, most coveted creations.
On August 1, the COMME des GARÇONS Aoyama flagship store will offer a selection of new CdG x Lewis Leather jackets for ¥308,000 (about $2,050) apiece, printed with typical all-caps phrases (though the most famous one is absent).
They will likely sell out almost instantly. That's how CdG's true believers roll.
A staple of the CdG wardrobe for at least 15 years or so, the Japanese label's handpainted leather jackets align a couple core CdG cues — punk history, heritage craft, unironically blunt slogans, the potency of single colors — into a single item.
To unpack that a bit: founder Rei Kawakubo was always deeply inspired by punk's first wave, a movement fomented around the time that she founded CdG in 1973.
These jackets are as much an ode to Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren's Sex Pistols costuming as they are steeped in imagined subcultural references.
The riders jacket is an adopted punk classic, you see, and the DIY lettering lends a little hands-on grit. The slogans themselves are cheerily no-nonsense, as is Kawakubo's wont (she really likes the "MY ENERGY COMES FROM FREEDOM" one) and the single color is a classic CdG motif, though the jackets are rendered in blue and red as often as all-black (the "karasu" era was a long time ago).
So they make sense within the CdG universe. But the jackets are also not really indicative of the CdG universe, given their approachability.
COMME des GARÇONS' genius is born of Kawakubo's anti-establishmentarian creative ethos, a singularly unreplicatable attitude that has permanently situated the 81-year-old as the ultimate designer's designer. She does not and has never created beauty for beauty's sake.
Kawakubo simply produces what she wishes to produce, to the initial chagrin of unlearned critics.
But even the most brilliant artistic agitator is prone to bouts of approachability.
The sculptural creations that Kawakubo dreams up for CdG's seasonal mainline collections are not singularly indicative of the label she founded over 50 years ago in Tokyo.
Still, more impassioned CdG fans often malign its most accessible products, like the "Converse heart shoes," because they're almost wholly unindicative of what makes Kawakubo's work so impressively inimitable.
These products are commercial acknowledgements that appear to fly in the face of Kawakubo's uncompromising brilliance.
They make sense in the context of a CdG wardrobe, to be fair, as a utilitarian counterpoint to the more avant statement pieces. The Lewis Leather jackets are so surprisingly classic, though, that they've become an opportunity for even the non-believers to flex.
Still, nothing wrong with that. It's just that, in an ideal situation, they'd merely be a gateway into the greater, gorgeous world of CdG.
