Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Celebrity doesn't really affect the work. What affects the work is the expectations from the outside. This is what no one understands.
Every time before a collection, I say, "I don't want it to come out. I want to cancel it. It's not good. I haven't achieved anything."
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.
I am always thinking that some interesting possibility, some accidental synergy, could occur in a collaboration, and people seem to like it.
I am just working every day, day to day, with what I believe. It's a very ordinary way of dealing with your life - just dealing with your work.
It's interesting for me to sell Comme des Garcons in places it's never been sold before to people who might not have heard of Comme des Garcons.
The first thing you need in order to make a business viable is to preserve a cash flow. I made sure I didn't have any financial backing or support.
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.
Growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it is not why I do the work I do. It is a very personal thing - everything comes from inside.
All kinds of ways of expression are spreading out all over the place, information is overflowing, and it's harder and harder to be excited about anything.
Not everyone necessarily needs new things all the time and creative designs. It's good to have luxury restaurants and fast-food restaurants. You need both.
I'd make my whole collection with just one square of fabric. I wouldn't do anything else; everything had to be made from one square. This is just one example.
I want to create a market where people from all walks of life can encounter each other in an atmosphere of beautiful chaos, the coming together of kindred souls.
I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else's.
Not only in the creative world but also in the sports world. The most successful achievers in sports are people that are really driven and have that spirit of hunger.
The very, very first thing that I wanted was to make a living - be independent and have a job. It might have come later, that kind of reaction to the boringness of fashion.
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.
I give myself limits - not only financial limits, but I also limit my method of expression, and from within those limits, I try to come up with something new and interesting.
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.
Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me, it is never ending.
I don't like to explain the clothes, how I made them, the theme, et cetera. It's because the clothes are just as you see them and feel them. That's what I want... just see and feel them.
What someone wears is an expression of oneself. When you're just comfortable with what you're wearing, you don't have new thoughts. I want people to feel something and think about who they are.
I always just wanted to have enough to carry on. I never had ambitions to take over the world or be a global enterprise. But I wanted to have a strong business in order to do the main objective.
As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere.
What's good about many people liking the work is that when I want to collaborate or am interested in the synergy of artists working together, nobody ever says no to me when I ask to work with them.
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.
My approach is simple. It is nothing other than what I am thinking at the time I make each piece of clothing, whether I think it is strong and beautiful. The result is something that other people decide.
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.
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.
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.
It was also never wanting to be part of any group or movement or anything that was the done thing. I hated organization. When you have a group, you have a leader who is going to put down the rest of the group.
My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk and do not have an exact starting point for any collection.
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.
The first thing we do is sit around a table and discuss what we could pick up from daily life, from space. That's how it starts, completely abstract. There's no kind of, "Oh, let's do Peru," or "Let's do pleats," you know?
Fashion alone is so far from being the whole story. It seems that with fashion, as with art, things are getting easier in one sense, but at the same time, it is getting harder to be stimulated about things or excite people.
The monsters I thought about are those that don't fit in - those who think differently from the majority, the people of exception, outsiders. I wish that society would place more importance and value on these kinds of monsters.
Clothes are only completed when somebody actually wears them. If they were art, they could be more abstract. As long as something is new and has never been seen before, I don't mind if people call it art. Wear them if you dare.
I always had good reactions from people with a good eye and a vision... and very terrible reactions from those who are afraid of people who are different to others - at the beginning and even now. I have never worried about it too much.
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.
The place I am always looking for - because in order to keep the business, I need to make a little compromise between my values and customers' values - is the place where I make something that could almost - but not quite - be understood by everyone.
The Dover Street Markets bring brands of all disciplines together to sell their products in an open atmosphere that, most importantly, incites creativity. They are, along with the 'Comme des Garcons' stores, usually located in areas off the beaten track.
The more people that are afraid when they see new creation, the happier I am. I think the media has some responsibility to bear for people becoming more conservative. Many parts of the media have created the situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive.
If I do something I think is new, it will be misunderstood, but if people like it, I will be disappointed because I haven't pushed them enough. The more people hate it, maybe the newer it is. Because the fundamental human problem is that people are afraid of change.
I'm always looking to make something that didn't exist before, fumbling about in the dark, not just while making a collection. The search for something new is a constant in my everyday life. But constantly searching for something new is like looking for a well in a desert.
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.
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."
In terms of creation, I have never thought of suiting any system or abiding by any rules. In this respect I have remained free. The necessity has grown, as we have gotten bigger, to think about commercial aspects of the business more and more, because of the responsibility we have toward our staff and our factories.
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.
Years ago, it was easier to make new things than it is now. The weight of experience weighs heavily, and the expectations; everybody wants to see something they haven't seen before. Now, with social media, with too much information, with the speed of information - all that is making it harder and harder to realize the objective.
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.