How Comme des Garçons Made the “Unbeautiful” Beautiful

Eat Well Feel Well Live Well
17 hours ago
4 min read

Author: Eat Well · Feel Well · Live Well Editorial Team

Are beautiful clothes supposed to flatter the body and resolve into a harmonious silhouette? Since the 1970s, Comme des Garçons has quietly pushed back against that assumption. Black. Asymmetry. Volume that envelops the body. Tailoring with echoes of menswear. What was first met with unease eventually introduced a new standard of beauty to fashion. Through five garments spanning roughly four decades, we trace how that idea evolved.

Black Was Never the Point

The blue wool-blend ensemble from the Autumn/Winter 1983–84 collection Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats shows why Comme des Garçons cannot be neatly summed up as “the brand of black.” Panels of vivid blue cross the front of the top, falling into a soft drape before drawing close at the waist. The checked skirt does not spread evenly on either side; shifts in the direction and length of the fabric create several outlines at once.

The back, by contrast, is more restrained, allowing two distinct expressions to exist within the same garment. The complexity seen from the front suddenly quietens when viewed from behind, changing the impression of the clothes as the wearer moves. Rather than relying on added decoration, the shape is created by layering, shifting and leaving fabric deliberately in excess.

Even in colour, the aim was not to make the clothes look polished or conventionally beautiful. It was to take the familiar structure of clothing and make it strange again.

One House. More Than One Voice.

The printed cotton dress by Junya Watanabe/Comme des Garçons from Spring/Summer 2003 brings romantic dress and practical equipment into the same garment. With its pale, finely patterned fabric, rounded sleeves and long, full skirt, it appears soft and familiar at first glance.

Buckles, broad straps and pouch-like forms interrupt the chest and waist, blurring the line between clothing and bag. These are not decorative additions. They gather the fabric, secure it to the body and alter the silhouette. The straps cross the torso at the front and support the volume of the cloth at the back, making function impossible to separate from appearance. The creativity that grew within Comme des Garçons was never passed on by repeating the same look.

What the house shared was an approach: bring an unfamiliar function or context into an existing garment, then use the collision to create a form that had no name before.

The Bride, Undone and Remade

The Autumn/Winter 2005–06 collection Broken Bride draws on the familiar memory of bridal dress, only to undo its finished image. Ivory satin, lace, ruffles and a high collar recall old wedding gowns and formal costume. Large sections of black fabric are laid over them, while uneven hems, trailing details and heavily pieced sleeves break what might otherwise have been a single, graceful line.

Even from the front, it is difficult to tell where the jacket ends and the dress begins. The garment appears to hold several periods of dress at once, revealing another layer each time the eye moves across it. It refuses to be read at a glance as one complete gown. White does not simply stand for purity, nor black for loss; celebration and unease, completion and collapse occupy the same garment. Familiar signs of femininity are not erased. They are taken apart and assembled under a different order.

What appears broken acquires a tension and beauty that a perfectly resolved dress could never hold.

Black Doesn’t Mean What It Used To

The black dress from 2022 shows that, for Comme des Garçons, black is not a fixed house style but material to be worked and reworked. The body is held in a long, narrow line that falls quietly towards the floor, while the neckline rises into an outsized construction. Folded layers, sheer fabric and sections pierced with flower-like openings gather around the neck, blurring the boundaries between collar and ornament, clothing and sculpture.

At close range, a single colour separates into gloss, transparency and shadow. The volume surrounding the face does not frame the body in the usual flattering sense. It conceals part of it while creating another outline in its place. If the early use of black resisted fashion’s decorative excess through restraint, here black contains a dense mix of textures and complicated volume. Severity and excess meet within the same dress.

Comme des Garçons has not preserved black as a fixed brand code. Its continuity lies in repeatedly changing what black can mean.

The Freedom to See Beauty in the “Unbeautiful”

The linear black shapes of the 1970s. The displaced draping of 1983–84. The straps of 2003. The broken bride of 2005. The sculptural collar of 2022. These garments do not share a single, instantly recognisable silhouette.

Their appearance changes from one decade to the next, without repeating past success as a safe formula. What they share is a willingness to question the promises traditionally attached to clothes: that they should look resolved, flatter the body and declare a clear purpose. Asymmetry, openings, excess fabric and unlikely combinations of material are not concealed as flaws. They make the eye stop. Rather than offering a finished answer, the clothes turn the questions back on us: Why this shape? Is it really unbeautiful?

Discomfort is not something to be removed. It becomes an entrance to a form of beauty for which we may not yet have words. Comme des Garçons did more than establish a particular fashion. It gave us greater freedom to decide, with our own eyes rather than inherited standards, what deserves to be called beautiful.

Images courtesy of Comme des Garçons.

Editor’s Note

When tracing a brand’s clothes across decades, we tend to look for a recurring colour or shape. Yet the garments gathered here—a blue drape, straps crossing the body, a bridal dress taken apart, a black collar built like sculpture—refuse to settle on the same answer.

What remains consistent is not their appearance, but their willingness to question the kind of beauty expected of clothes. Perhaps beauty is not a style to be preserved, but something that emerges when familiar standards are set aside and looked at again.

Key Sources

Kerry Taylor Auctions, dot COMME: The Auction press release, 2026.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, 2017.