Viewing Posts tagged: WSJ.
“I don’t feel too excited about fashion today, more fearful that people don’t necessarily want or need strong new clothes, that there are not enough of us believing in the same thing, that there is a kind of burnout, that people just want cheap fast clothes and are happy to look like everyone else, that the flame of creation has gone a bit cold, that enthusiasm and passionate anger for change and rattling the status quo is weakening. But what I still love about it is that playing the fool, acting silly, showing off, being a celebrity designer are all integral and necessary parts of the fashion business. And creation excites me, because without creation there can be no progress.
The process of working with the aim of finding something new is really tough. It has always been tough. It’s extremely difficult to create in order to cause people to feel something, in order that people feel they are given something. It’s natural that the pressure is intense if this is your aim.
Fashion is something you attach to yourself, put on, and through that interaction the meaning of it is born. Without the wearing of it, it has no meaning, unlike a piece of art. It is fashion because people want to buy it now, because they want to wear it now, today. Fashion is only the right now.”
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From the last three paragraphs of the WSJ. Magazine (September 2011, the Fashion Issue) interview with the saintly Rei Kawakubo, Empress of the Comme des Garcons realm.
She is photographed above during her Paris show in 1987.
From the accompanying profile photo is this short note: Preferring to let the work speak for itself, Kawakubo has not sat for a portrait since this 2004 photograph and rarely grants interviews.
