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In the '70s, if anything, it was a more interesting time in fashion. It was a time when things were changing, especially in London.

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
Especially
Fashion
Interesting
Anything
Things
Time
London
Changing

More quotes by Rei Kawakubo

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I don't think of myself as anyone special, and I would not know how to define myself.
Rei Kawakubo
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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
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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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You can tell if it's a good collection if people are afraid of it. In ten years, everyone will love it.
Rei Kawakubo
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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.
Rei Kawakubo
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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.
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.
Rei Kawakubo
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I make clothes for a woman who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.
Rei Kawakubo
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Most of the things I read from journalists are, you know, a little bit simplified and easy.
Rei Kawakubo
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I haven't yet made clothes that I have been totally satisfied with, and maybe I never will.
Rei Kawakubo
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The freedom I give myself for the business is in deciding to take part in the Paris collections, but also having other retail strategies that are unlike anybody else's. Not necessarily going into malls, doing the business my own way - having different brands to cover different concepts, to be able to have the cash flow to carry on.
Rei Kawakubo
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I work in three shades of black.
Rei Kawakubo
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For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.
Rei Kawakubo
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Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.
Rei Kawakubo
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I can't become naked for everybody. It's never going to be possible for the person to write the whole story completely, so I find bits of myself, bits of what I think in some articles. And I don't give lip service to journalists. I never make them feel comfortable. I say, It's your job to make the story.
Rei Kawakubo
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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.
Rei Kawakubo
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Creation takes things forward. Without anything new there is no progress. Creation equals new.
Rei Kawakubo
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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.
Rei Kawakubo
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Feeling free inside oneself is being free.
Rei Kawakubo
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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.
Rei Kawakubo