Word: reis
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Fashion people and architects have long been giving each other dirty looks; fashion designers don't get the respect that architects do, and architects don't get their own perfume brands. The graduate school of design, which does not teach fashion, just gave japanese designer rei kawakubo the excellence in design award; does this mean a cease-fire...
...house of design threw down its welcome mat for the matriarch of another as the Graduate School of Design (GSD) honored Rei Kawakubo of fashion mainstay Comme des Garons last Wednesday for "pushing the proverbial design envelope." Rei may draw outside the lines, but certainly the GSD's award ceremony held in her honor did not. Despite the celebrity element, the event proved to be austere and somewhat dull, probably less interesting than the classes normally held in the recently redone but still stark Gund Hall. The casual attendee yearned for a supermodel or two strutting down the aisles catwalk...
...worn "everything Comme des Garons" in honor of the occasion and the older gentleman with a serious dark suit festooned with flaming red slippers enlivened the bland demeanor of an audience mostly clad in stuffy black apparel or Harvard student Abercrombie gear. The former was understandable; after all, "Rei invented black as a color," as we were later told by one of the speakers. Thank God she has forayed into colors of a brighter nature, offering hopeful hints of respite from a fashion-following scene overflowing with gloomily garbed sycophants and cheek-kissers. The severe woman dressed in the morose...
...guilty of flouting convention, so is Rei Kawakubo. Since 1981, when she made her first Paris showing, the creative force behind Comme des Garons has taken avant-garde fashion to evermore jaw-dropping levels. Jagged ruffles, tattered plaid and wads of foam creating Quasimodo-like lumps are all incorporated into a body of work that can hardly be described as ready-to-wear. Jorge Silvetti, Chair of the GSD Department of Architecture, quoted Kawakubo as having said "I want to design clothes that have not yet existed; I want to be rebellious." Despite, or perhaps because of, her defiantly individualistic...
This is not just a window dresser's manual; we come away with wonderful wisdoms for living today's life rightly. Ultimately, this is a book of the lives of people who dare and try and do. From Barney Pressman to Rei Kawabuko (of Comme Des Garcons) to his own grandmother, Doonan barrels through a life of extraordinary somebodies, from whom he rubs off a heady, giddy, and invincible euphoria which is both playfully irreverent as well as healthily capitalistic...