Rei Kawakubo has said that if she could have invented one garment, it would have been the white shirt. “It’s a fundamental part of a man’s wardrobe,” her husband, translator, and company CEO, Adrian Joffe, said on her behalf. “Shirt, jacket, and pants are the fundamental basis.”

There’s irony in the fact that Comme des Garçons operates a menswear brand called Shirt, dedicated to finding myriad ways to deconstruct a button-down. It’s possible that Rei Kawakubo has really already thought of everything. There’s also a little irony in the fact that while everyone is absorbed in the sweatpants-versus-suiting debate—years into the pandemic, a bored, binary way of thinking—Kawakubo is joyously producing shirts in Tokyo. The button-down is a middling, forgettable garment if ever there was one, and yet in her hands, it’s more compelling than most of what we’ve seen this year. Kawakubo always tends to get the last laugh.

Source: Vogue

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