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I've always said that growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.

Rei Kawakubo

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Rei Kawakubo
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: October 11
Businessperson
Designer
Fashion Designer
Personal Stylist
City of Tokyo
Comme des Garçons
Kawakubo
Kawakubo Rei
Comes
Japan
Felt
Connection
Work
Accidents
Really
Connections
Always
Experiences
Never
Inside
Growing
Postwar
Born
Accident

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I identified very much with punk, not only in the fashion sector, but in every other sector. The very nature of doing something new and free meant something that was against authority.
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Most of the things I read from journalists are, you know, a little bit simplified and easy.
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Creation takes things forward. Without anything new there is no progress. Creation equals new.
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It would have more meaning for me to hear what critics have to say if their values and their ways of living were deeper and more serious.
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Fashion is not art. The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.
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In the sense that anarchy equals freedom, yes. Anarchy means freedom, but it also means chaos.
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For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.
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There's always a pattern in order to make a thing, but the starting point must be something I've never seen before. It's not two-dimensional, but it's like a sample. I work with patterns like a sculptor. I try to get [the team] not to work on a body, [but] to work on a free space, on a table. The work is basically on flat surfaces.
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I make clothes for a woman who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.
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What you wear can largely govern your feelings and your emotions, and how you look influences the way people regard you. So fashion plays an important role on both the practical level and the aesthetic level of activity.
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I am kind of like the guide, the leader of this discussion. It could be from me, it could be from other people, it could be a mixture. It's a real sort of guild. I lead it and direct it and inspire it.
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Celebrity doesn't really affect the work. What affects the work is the expectations from the outside. This is what no one understands.
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Feeling free inside oneself is being free.
Rei Kawakubo
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If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.
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In Comme des Garçons, I hardly do any sketches there's no fittings on bodies, there's no models that come in and say, Oh, a little bit like this. In the beginning, there isn't even a theme. It's like getting the whole world at your feet - to empty your mind of everything that's ever happened before, to get an empty space.
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I don't think of myself as anyone special, and I would not know how to define myself.
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Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.
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I am a clothes maker, and that's all I am. I only want to talk about the making of the clothes. I don't feel the need to go out there and explain that.
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I'd rather [the collection] have no title. Journalists like titles. That's why I give them to you.
Rei Kawakubo