Since Rei Kawakubo founded the label in 1969, Comme Des Garcon is often associated with a thrashed-punk style and “anti-fashion”. Her fashions not only stand apart from the genealogy of clothing but also resist definition and confound interpretation. They can be read as Zen koans or riddles devised to baffle, bemuse, and bewilder. Her work explores the ideas of space, emptiness, and in-between, braving through the unsettling zone of visual ambiguity and elusiveness. Her strive for the “uncomfortable” not only drives the design of clothing, but also permeates into advertising and physical experience. CDG’s radical proportions, abstract imagery, and eccentric environment together construct a radical yet consistent portrait of a brand that challenges the status quo.

Rei’s fashion defies conventional classification, her clothes expose the artificiality, arbitrariness, and “emptiness” of conventional dichotomies. Her advertising style for Comme Des Garcons has also been radically unorthodox. Created in 1988, SIX was a bi-annual publication that served as a testing ground for experimental marketing. A reflection of the (anti)fashion, this magazine often included seemingly random images and design to convey the brand's ethos, reinforcing the mystery of the CDG lifestyle. By exploring themes of dichotomies, we set out to create images that are less clear and banal, but instead make people curious and (a little) uncomfortable, sparking conversations and imaginations.

Project: Converse X CDG Play Global Campaign
Date: November 2023
Creative Director: Justin Jiang
Photographer: Charlie Engman
Production: Versatiles Studio