Comme des Garçons

Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garcons in Tokyo in 1969, and with her Paris debut in 1981 she detonated a quiet bomb under Western fashion, presenting torn, asymmetric, monochrome garments the press called 'Hiroshima chic'.

Her work rejected every convention of beauty and proportion, treating clothing as conceptual sculpture and asking whether a garment must flatter, or even fit, to have meaning.

Landmark collections like 1997's 'Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body', with its bulging padded forms, proved that fashion could be as intellectually radical as any contemporary art.

Beyond the runway, Kawakubo built a creative empire, from the Dover Street Market concept stores to the cult Play line with its watching-heart logo, all governed by her uncompromising vision.

Today Comme des Garcons stands as the most influential avant-garde house in fashion, a place where imperfection, ambiguity and the unconventional are pursued as the highest forms of beauty.