Lucinda Chambers On Rei Kawakubo

From taking in the spectacular early Comme des Garçons show in the early Eighties, to working with her on early lookbooks that same decade, Vogue’s fashion director Lucinda Chambers has long been devoted to Rei Kawakubo. Here she sheds a little light on that love and why it has lasted the test of time.

Before Rei Kawakubo came, the revolution was with Mary Quant and the mini skirt. Up until that point, fashion and clothes had always been either smart or sexy, but never both.

What Rei and the Japanese did was offer a way of dressing that was intelligent and extraordinary at the same time. It was total liberation. I mean, you could still look properly bonkers - I remember I saved up all my money to wear a Comme jacket and put a wastepaper basket on my head - but it was so much more than just a bonkers thing. If you didn’t fit into that mould of either ‘smart’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘girly’, it just opened the whole fashion world up.

Rei's way of cutting, draping and fashioning clothes on the body was so new at the time and she still does it to this day. It wasn’t referenced though, it seemed to come out of nowhere: one minute everyone was wearing a Chanel jacket with leggings and a pearl choker and the next, wow.

What is quite wonderful about her is that she takes things that are part of the fashion dialogue and even where she reinterprets them, there is nothing derivative or cynical about what she does. It feels to me as if Rei is trying to turn fashion and the idea of what is beautiful on its head, inside out and back to front, and as she gets older she becomes more rebellious.

Quite a lot of Punk was about women having a loud, strong and anti-establishment voice, and that is how I see Rei; pushing, pushing, pushing us until we might feel uncomfortable and have to ask ourselves why.