Future/Primitive: Comme des Garçons and the Return to Fashion Instinct
In an age of algorithmic fashion trends, influencer uniformity, and data-driven design, the rebellious instinct that once defined fashion feels like a fading signal. Yet, standing boldly against this tide of predictability is Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons—a label that refuses to conform to the conventions of modern trend cycles. With its roots in the avant-garde, Kawakubo’s vision resurrects a primal, raw energy in fashion, a visceral expression that reconnects with instinct over intellect. This return to the “primitive” isn’t a retreat, but a leap into the future—a future that begins where calculation ends and feeling takes over.
The Origins of Comme des Garçons: Rebellion at Its Core
Founded in 1969 and formally launched in Tokyo in 1973, Comme des Garçons has always existed in opposition. While the world of fashion leaned towards beauty, symmetry, and seasonal novelties, Kawakubo began crafting something altogether different. The collections of the early 1980s shocked Paris. With monochrome palettes, asymmetrical cuts, and tattered edges, Kawakubo earned the derisive nickname “Hiroshima chic” from critics who failed to understand the deeper narrative. This wasn’t just about destruction—it was about rebirth.
The DNA of Comme des Garçons has never been about dressing the body according to accepted norms. It has always been about challenging what a body can be, what clothes can say, and who gets to decide what is fashionable. Kawakubo often emphasizes the importance of “creation, not communication,” stripping away marketing fluff and returning to the raw act of making. This is fashion in its most primitive—and most future-forward—form.
Future/Primitive: A Paradoxical Aesthetic
To describe Comme des Garçons as “future/primitive” is not to indulge in contradiction, but to embrace the paradox that lies at the heart of its vision. In Kawakubo’s hands, primitive doesn’t imply regression—it signifies origin. Her designs often resemble objects unearthed from ancient rituals or alternate civilizations. Raw seams, bulbous forms, distressed fabrics—they evoke a pre-language world of symbols and shapes, where garments are talismans rather than commodities.
At the same time, these pieces project into the future. Their silhouettes defy categorization. They do not flatter in the traditional sense, nor do they adhere to current definitions of gender, wearability, or elegance. Instead, they ask: what if the future is not smooth, sleek, and digital—but textured, irregular, and tactile? Comme des Garçons challenges the sterile aesthetic of a tech-driven future with something far more human, even feral.
Fashion Instinct in the Age of Overthinking
The rise of fast fashion and social media has turned style into a game of replication. What’s “in” today is “out” tomorrow, and the question of why one wears something is often secondary to who else is wearing it. Kawakubo’s work offers a counterpoint to this collective inertia. In rejecting logic, she creates space for instinct—a return to the inner impulse that once guided early humans in their creative acts.
There’s something animalistic, even shamanic, about the act of wearing Comme des Garçons. The designs are often enveloping, cocoon-like, disfiguring. They do not accentuate the self, but rather obscure it, inviting a confrontation with what lies beneath surface appearances. This is fashion not as a tool of identity, but as a vessel for transformation. To wear Comme des Garçons is not to be seen—it is to become.
This is perhaps the clearest link to the idea of the primitive: not the primitive as inferior or outdated, but as unmediated, unfiltered. Kawakubo’s return to instinct is a critique of fashion’s obsession with reasoning, its addiction to analytics and trend forecasting. She offers an alternative: fashion as ritual, fashion as feeling, fashion as a process of intuitive making and wearing.
Genderless, Timeless, Ageless
Part of Comme des Garçons’ refusal to conform lies in its complete disregard for demographic targeting. Most collections blur, distort, or ignore gender altogether. Traditional markers of masculinity or femininity dissolve into abstraction. Kawakubo doesn’t just design clothes for women or men—she designs for figures, forms, and presences.
Time also loses meaning in the Comme des Garçons universe. The collections do not fit neatly into seasonal boxes. Many pieces from the 1980s could walk a runway today without seeming out of place—and not because they were ahead of their time, but because they were outside of time entirely. Her pieces resist linear narratives; they are circular, ritualistic, and enduring. They are not nostalgic but prophetic, speaking to future conditions of human expression and embodiment.
The Cult of Creation Over Consumption
In a consumer culture defined by excess, Kawakubo remains resolutely anti-commercial, even as she operates a successful global brand. Unlike most designers who stage runway shows as product launches, Kawakubo treats the runway as a medium of expression. Her presentations are closer to performance art than sales pitches. The clothes, while available for purchase, often defy immediate practicality or mass appeal.
This insistence on creative autonomy has earned her a fiercely loyal following among artists, designers, intellectuals, and those who view fashion as a space for critical thought and imaginative exploration. Comme des Garçons is not a lifestyle—it is a lens, a philosophy, a disruption.
In the Future/Primitive vision, creation is an act of resistance. Against uniformity. Against polish. Against the tyranny of relevance. The clothes demand attention not because they are beautiful in a traditional sense, but because they confront the very notion of beauty itself. They remind us that fashion, at its core, is not about fitting in—it is about breaking free.
The Legacy and Influence of Kawakubo’s Vision
Rei Kawakubo’s influence has been seismic, far beyond the borders of her own brand. Designers like Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela, and Junya Watanabe (her protégé) have drawn from her irreverent approach. Even mainstream fashion houses borrow elements of her deconstructionist ethos, though rarely with the same integrity or depth.
Her 2017 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, titled Art of the In-Between, was only the second solo designer show in the museum’s history, after Yves Saint Laurent. The exhibit framed her work not merely as fashion, but as sculpture, philosophy, and poetic provocation. It affirmed what many already believed: that Kawakubo is less a designer and more a medium—channeling something ancient and otherworldly through fabric and form.
Conclusion: The Future Is Primitive
In an era obsessed with progress, Kawakubo offers an alternative path—one that loops backward through time, only to emerge ahead of the curve. Comme Des Garcons Converse The future of fashion, she suggests, is not found in faster production, smarter fabrics, or more efficient trends. It lies in the return to instinct, the rediscovery of primal forms, and the embrace of that which defies explanation.
Comme des Garçons does not seek to dress us for the world as it is, but for the world as it could be—raw, strange, and beautifully unfinished. The future, it turns out, is not a place of sleek perfection, but one where we reconnect with the impulse to create, to feel, and to be unafraid of the unknown. That is the heart of the Future/Primitive—and it beats loudest in the silence between the seams.
