When Comme des Garçons signed a line of furniture Created by Rei Kawakubo in the 80s for his boutiques

That Rei Kawakubo was and is one of the most influential designers in fashion of the last forty years is not even a matter of discussion, but of observation. With her iconic brand Comme de Garçons, the Japanese designer has in fact indelibly marked fashion since the 80s, becoming a reference point of the fashion system, despite the now forty years of activity, and almost eighty years of age on her shoulders. But if her shows and her most famous collections are already the subject of numerous essays, such as, for example, Andrew Bolton's volume, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between taken from the major 2017 retrospective exhibition dedicated to her by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is another aspect of her work that is not talked about enough: her furniture collection.

As you can easily understand from this description, it was a totally experimental project, which for this reason did not take off even from a commercial point of view. Hence, one presumes, the decision to close the furniture production, which for a long time remained in oblivion. The person who exhumed it was Didier Courbot, a Comme de Garçons scholar and owner of the a1043 Gallery in Paris who, in 2017, decided to dedicate an exhibition to this very collection. His work was fundamental in bringing these works back to light, both from the point of view of recovering the original pieces - which there were about forty in the gallery - and in terms of the notional and conceptual aspect. Thanks to that exhibition it was possible to give the right emphasis to a story that otherwise would have been lost in the void. Didier Courbot's operation was the forerunner for a rediscovery of Kawakubo's works, on which there is now, however scarce, a literature. 

As we had also written about Rick Owens' interior design line, the furniture project is definitely not what Rei Kawakubo will remain in the history books for, but it is another lens through which to read her work. Looking at how she approached this project gives the dimension of the Japanese designer's multifaceted and multidimensional talent, and how she has managed to maintain a personal and original aesthetic beyond the medium, beyond whether these are furniture or sculpture, chairs or no chairs.