The Great Fashion Designers (34 page)

My clothes are for women who have money. They are not for a teenager who expects novelty; she could not afford them and the quality would be wasted on her since she does not wish to keep anything long. Too much of fashion is aimed at her so that mature women start to think that, since that is all there is, they must wear that too. I hate most of all the idea of women trying to look like children, trying to be a baby doll. So women like to look younger, that is natural but the general trend is for women to try to look like children and that is unnatural.

Armani felt unfairly ignored in the 1990s and 2000s, although the major retrospective of his work mounted by the Guggenheim in New York in 2000 and shown in Bilbao, Spain, and Berlin, London and Rome reminded people of his importance. He remained, in 2009, in control of his many companies.

Further reading:
The biography by Renata Molho and Antony Shugaar
Being Armani: A Biography
(2007) is up to date; the catalogue
Giorgio Armani
, from the Guggenheim exhibition of 2000, is brilliantly illustrated and the text is good.

If the 1980s is the decade of excess, when greed was good and glamour was very much the order of the day—in Ronald Reagan's White House and the London of Diana, Princess of Wales—then fashion had the designers to dress it. This was the time of high-glam Dynasty dressing, Joan Collins in Bruce Oldfield, Nancy Reagan in Oscar de la Renta, Princess Diana in the Emanuels. It was also the decade of the first of the great reinventions; Karl Lagerfeld took Coco Chanel's legacy, shook it up hard and put it back together mischievously exaggerated and in slightly the wrong order.

By the start of the 1980s Paris had regained much of the initiative in world fashion but it was no longer possible for one national industry to be dominant. The women's movement was gaining momentum, and high-earning women in all kinds of professions were becoming consumers of fashion. They did not, however, all want to consume the same kind of fashion. The decade's archetype is doubtless the high-flying executive ‘dressed for success'. Derogatively known as the ‘executive tart' or ‘boardroom bitch', she was suited and stilettoed, broad-shouldered, tight-skirted, plunge-necklined, decked in gold buttons, buckles, bangles and chains and cast as the predatory villain in several contemporary movies. In Paris, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana,
Azzedine Alaia
and, when in the mood,
Jean Paul Gaultier
did the parody version. In Italy, Giorgio Armani and the young
Gianni Versace
and in America, Halston, Geoffrey Beene, Calvin Klein,
Donna Karan
and, when in the mood, Ralph Lauren did the well-bred, seriously grown-up version. In Britain, minimalist designers like
Paul Smith
and Margaret Howell kept pace with classics featuring, as Smith always puts it, ‘a twist'.

But there were many alternative ways to dress. At the beginning of the decade London was experiencing a creative renaissance with a large number of exciting young designers including
Vivienne Westwood
, Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Katharine Hamnett, Body Map, Betty Jackson, Sheridan Barnett, Sheilagh Brown, Wendy Dagworthy, Jasper Conran and
John Galliano
. They had varied styles ranging from Big Look to body-con, androgynous to lyrical. The Antwerp Six—Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter van Beirendonck, Dries van Noten, Dirk van Saene. Ann Demeulemeester and Marina Yee—presented their collections in London in 1985, adding to the prevailing atmosphere of innovation. In Italy
Gianni Versace
found his signature style, an upfront eroticism that offended feminists and delighted many others. The new kids on the block were
Domenico Dolce
and
Stefano Gabbana
who also purveyed a corseted and clichéd sex appeal.

Almost as a counterbalance to all the exhibitionistic sensuality heating up the catwalks, the most remarkable moment of the 1980s came at the beginning when the Japanese designers,
Rei Kawakubo
of Comme des Garçons and
Yohji Yamamoto
, first showed in Paris. In 1981 both separately sent out an army of grim-faced models, hair shorn, faces painted white or with smeared make-up, wearing clothes that were to change fashion forever. It made high heels, cartoon glamour and impeccable make-up look dated. Both designers eschewed occidental ideas of female beauty in favour of a more cerebral approach which used the body as an armature for extraordinary shapes sculpted in fabric. It provoked all fashion's observers and many of its practitioners to reassess their subject.

Of the Japanese designers who made a worldwide impact in the 1970s and 1980s, Rei Kawakubo has perhaps strayed furthest from the pure, strict vision of the first collections she brought to Paris in 1981. It is possible that nothing so sensational had happened in fashion in Paris since Christian Dior had unveiled his New Look and the press, in shock, did running mental readjustments on their senses of proportion, propriety and aesthetics. In 1947 they re-embraced their inner fertility goddess; in 1981 they were forced to reassess the provenance of female sensuality and sexual attraction. Traditional Western fashion has generally (but not exclusively) situated them in the body. Rei Kawakubo insisted that they were, in fact, located in the brain. She told Nicholas Coleridge in 1988, ‘The goal for all women should be to make her own living and to support herself, to be self-sufficient. That is the philosophy of her clothes. They are working for modern women, women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds.' This dream of anonymous self-sufficiency had, said Kawakubo, been her beacon since childhood.

Small and self-effacingly modest, Kawakubo is intensely work-focused, perhaps even slightly masochistic in her passion for doing things the hard way. ‘It's boring if things are accomplished too easily, right?' she insisted to Leonard Koren in 1984. ‘When I work I think about the excitement of achievement after hard effort and pain.' In terms of her approach, Deyan Sudjic identifies her as a modernist (she admires Le Corbusier) but Harold Koda pointed out in his text for the 1987 Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) exhibition, Three Women, that Japan's 1,000 year-old philosophy of aesthetics encompasses irregularity, imperfection and asymmetry as reminders of the fragility and transience of beauty. And Kawakubo was a student of philosophy. It is possible to identify postmodernism in her approach, too, in that she frequently deconstructs—literally and conceptually—and questions the clichés and familiar elements of Western and oriental clothing and makes us think. Not that she has any didactic purpose; she is on an exploration of her own which is to do with the relationship of clothes to the body and the body to clothes, of how sexuality is expressed or not in clothes and how something entirely new may be made within the challenging limits of what it is possible to make and wear.

Unlike the other designers who changed both fashion in Japan and the world's perception of Japanese fashion, Rei Kawakubo had no formal training. Born in Tokyo in 1942, the daughter of a professor at Keio University, a respected private institution, she started school in a defeated, occupied country and was part of the flowering of talent prompted by the post-war economic boom and the gradually widened horizons that came with it. She studied both Japanese and Western art at her father's university and, on graduating in 1964, went to work in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a major chemical company which was Japan's biggest producer of acrylic fibres. In producing promotional material for print and television advertising intended to give acrylic a fashionable image, Kawakubo became a stylist, one of Japan's first. Three years later, alienated by the paternalism traditional within Japanese companies, she became the first freelance stylist. However, gradually she became aware that styling
would not satisfy her urge to stretch her imagination for very long. She had invented the Comme des Garçons label (because she liked the way it sounded) for the clothes she designed and made for the advertisements she styled and by 1973 she had established a company and began to make clothes for sale. ‘It wasn't a major decision,' she said. ‘Working as a stylist my responsibility was very small compared with that of the art director and the photographer. I became frustrated with what I was doing and wanted to do more.' She does not regret her lack of formal training. ‘If you can afford to take the time to train your eye and develop a sense of aesthetics in a natural way, it has a lot to recommend it.'

If Comme des Garçons had a certain ring to it, it also seemed appropriate for the simplicity of the clothes she was making, clothes which took a masculine wardrobe as a distant starting point. Interviewed by Geraldine Ranson of the
Sunday Telegraph
in 1983, she said, ‘Most men don't like women who are capable of working hard. They do not like strong independent women with their feet on the ground.' She did not expect men outside the fashion industry to understand her clothes. ‘It's not cute or soft and it doesn't fit a man's image of a woman.' But then, as she had told Mary Russell of
Vogue
in 1982, ‘I do not find clothes that reveal the body sexy.'

In 1975 Kawakubo showed her first womenswear collection in Tokyo and began her collaboration with the architect Takao Kawasaki to develop a very particular identity for her shops. She also produced the first of a series of catalogues which enabled her to disseminate images of her clothes styled as she wished them to be seen. ‘I try to reflect my approach not just in the clothes, but in the accessories, the shows, the shops, even in my office. You have to see it as a total impression and not just look at the exposed seams and black.'

In 1978 she launched Homme, her menswear collection; it was followed by Tricot and Robe de Chambre in 1981 and Noir in 1987. The biggest step, however, was in 1981 when, in order to gain recognition internationally, she took her collection to show at the Intercontinental Hotel Paris—to mixed reviews, some bewildered, some dismissive. However, both she and Yohji Yamamoto (the pair had been lovers) were invited to present a catwalk show the following season, the first time the Chambre Syndicale had ever extended such an invitation to foreign designers. Kawakubo showed an asymmetric monochrome collection which included trousers with sweater cuffs at the ankles topped with hybrid tunic/shawls, voluminous overcoats buttoned left to right
comme des garçons
and boiled-wool knits with the neck hole cut into the chest or the shoulder so that, on the body, the garments made gauche but intriguingly eccentric, abstract shapes. There was no music, just a noise like a train clanging over points, and the models, their make-up dark, hungry-looking and out-of-synch with the features of their impassive faces, moved sedately, joylessly.

These clothes were at first sight puritanically austere and intellectual. Fashion was going through a stale patch, repeating itself, and the only hope for rejuvenation appeared to be young London. However, those who were there on that evening will never forget the shock and the delight. Shock because no one had made clothes like this before; and delight because although they appeared to espouse a deliberately ugly anti-aesthetic, they were strangely compelling and demanded that one did more than react with the senses; they insisted that you think about them. In 1984 Leonard Koren described Kawakubo as having the purest, most uncompromising and strongest avant-garde vision of all the designers to come to prominence in the 1970s. From the 1990s onwards, you are much more likely to find hand-painted crinoline ball gowns than dark, torn shrouds in her collections. In 1983, however, she gravely told Geraldine Ranson that her taste for working exclusively in black and white had remained unchanged for ten years or so.

In the early days of a palette of various shades of black, she wryly acknowledged the inherent weakness of her method. ‘I realised clothes have to be worn and sold to a certain number of people. That's the difference between being a painter or sculptor and a clothing designer. It is, in a sense, a very commercial field. Unfortunately my collections tend to be very concentrated and focused on very few ideas and this is a commercial problem. I try to get more variety. But I can't; it's not my way.'

Fortunately it has become her way. Each collection is indeed focused but Kawakubo is an instinctive
innovator, constantly challenging her own ingenuity. Having worked through her initial preoccupation with the structure of clothes, she turned her attention to surface and colour. The creation of her collections depends very much on a series of collaborations with key creatives. She has famously said that with every collection, ‘I start from zero.' Hiroshi Matsushita of the Orimono Kenkyu Sha textile company was an early contributor, developing fabrics in response to Kawakubo's questions, suggestions, thoughts and moods. Deyan Sudjic wrote in 1990, ‘It was Matsushita, for example, who devised the rayon criss-crossed with elastic that allowed Kawakubo to make the garments in the women's collection of 1984 bubble and boil as though they were melting. And it was Matsushita who formulated the bonded cotton rayon and poly-urethane fabric Kawakubo used for her asymmetric dresses of 1986.'