Rei's Way

fanfair

When Tokyo's Rei Kawakubo presented her first Comme des Gargons collection, in .Paris in 1982, her all-black, radically asymmetrical clothes seemed in determined defiance of every convention of tailoring. The avant-gardists adopted her as patron saint; traditionalists said her clothes were simply ugly; many retailers weren't quite sure what to think. But in fashion, shock turns quickly to chic. Six years later, her press people casually refer to the iconoclast's "classic" designs. Her latest commercial ventures bear witness to her staying power in the marketplace. This month she opens her second SoHo store, a boutique devoted exclusively to shirts. Some look like overscale Brooks Brothers buttondowns; others feature wired collars and randomly arranged buttons. She has also begun showing her new furniture line—with a characteristic emphasis on unorthodox geometry—in San Francisco and Chicago. While in recent years her women's clothes leaned toward a more conventional prettiness, her current collection finds her in reassuringly anti-traditional form. The laconic Kawakubo's statement on the line, which featured a lurid vermilion, is worthy of Diana Vreeland: "Black," she pronounced, "is RED."

BEN BRANTLEY