1/14/2021 Bridging the Art/Commerce Divide: Cindy Sherman and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons - Grey Art

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Cindy Sherman and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons
Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 93, 1990 Color photograph

Bridging the Art/Commerce Divide:

Cindy Sherman and Rei Kawakubo
of Comme des Garçons
In 1994, Cindy Sherman produced a series of photographs for the clothing company
Comme des Garçons that break virtually every rule of fashion photography. As philosopher
Roland Barthes has observed, fashion photography is generally governed by a “garment-
photograph-caption” formulation, an apt description that cannot, however, be applied to
Sherman’s interpretation of Comme des Garçons clothes. Her photographs center on
disjointed mannequins and bizarre characters, forcing the clothing itself into the
background. The lithe, physically ideal fashion model, so integral to the pages of Vogue,
Glamour, and Elle, is nowhere to be seen. In her place are a menagerie of confrontationally
unpretty surrogates, like the garishly made-up mannequin in Sherman’s Untitled (#302). The
“model’s” excessive makeup, hair in wild disarray, and bruised “ esh” recall the sex-and-
violence– saturated fashion photography of the 1970’s. The gure is further complicated by
the hollowed chest in which another vacant representation of the painted female face
resides. At an unnatural interval, the legs appear wearing . . . what, exactly? Are the pants
Comme des Garçons? Or is it the backdrop fabric that was designed by Kawakubo and
misappropriated by Sherman? In Untitled (# 304) is the masked mannequin wearing a
Comme des Garçons dress as originally designed by Kawakubo, or as altered by Sherman?
And which are the Comme des Garçons clothes in Untitled (#300)? And why has Sherman

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has donned a gloomy, battered mask in place of the model’s traditional bright smile (or look
of icy disdain, depending on the current style)? Even the “pretty” picture of the series,
Untitled (#296), which features Sherman resplendent with well-lit feathers artfully arranged
in her hair as she contemplates a mirror ball, is not about the clothes it purportedly features.
They are instead a minor element in the overall atmosphere of the photograph.

These “anti-fashion” photographs’ effects are shocking and discombobulating, particularly

when viewed in the light of conventional fashion photography. They are not, however, out of
place in the context of Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo’s approach to the
business of fashion design, which is strongly inspired by the values of the contemporary art
world. Her rst big success in the West came in 1981 with her inaugural Paris show, which
made her an overnight sensation and unapologetically illustrated her resolutely modernist
philosophy of clothing design. She claimed she wanted “to start from zero,” reexamining
clothes as if the entire history of costume did not exist. The garments in the initial Paris show
seemingly accomplished that goal. With her deconstructed and shapeless dresses in in nite
shades of black, Kawakubo questioned all the conventional assumptions of Western
fashion, in particular, that clothes should conform to or reshape the body. She simply
refused to pander to the usual drama of concealing or revealing the body. In turn,
Kawakubo and her intellectuality-imbued schmattes were enthusiastically embraced by
devotees of the avant-garde, especially in the New York art community.

While Kawakubo was being embraced as an artist’s fashion designer, Cindy Sherman was
made welcome in fashion industry circles. Her Untitled Film Stills series had established her
as an able manipulator and interpreter of mass media icons of femininity. Sherman’s forays
into fashion photography included a series of photographs for the Paris-based fashion
house Dorothée Bis and another for Diane Benson, an American retail entrepreneur who
later opened the rst Comme des Garçons store in New York City. Sherman also created
photographs for both Vogueand Harper’s Bazaar. Indeed, it was a Harper’s Bazaar layout
that precipitated her collaboration with Kawakubo. After seeing that layout in 1993,
Kawakubo contacted Sherman and provided her with clothing from each of the Comme des
Garçons collections, to be photographed however Sherman wished. The resulting images
were then used in the direct-mail campaign for the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter

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1994–95 collections and also displayed in the company’s SoHo boutique. These
photographs are less depictions of saleable product than challenges to the expectation of
what a fashion photograph should be.

If Sherman’s take on Kawakubo’s designs is dif cult to discuss as fashion photography, that
dif culty is mirrored in the fashion press’s attempts to come to terms with Comme des
Garçons clothes. Kawakubo has played both the creative genius and the saboteur in the
fashion industry. She has rejected most traditional fashion conventions in the design of her
clothes, in the decoration and layout of her shops, in her unorthodox advertising
campaigns, and in her sometimes confrontational runway shows. In the Comme des
Garçons fashion collections, Kawakubo has offered shirts with extra sleeves and neck holes,
jackets cut to be misbuttoned, skirts and dresses with wildly irregular hemlines, jackets with
slits up the length of the sleeve, jackets bearing only one shoulder, clothing with exposed
seams, or asymmetrical padding in unconventional places, and knitwear with holes used to
decorative effect: such clothes cannot be discussed in conventional fashion terms. In the
early 1980s her stores broke every rule of merchandising, displaying clothing sparsely and
under uninvitingly harsh uorescent light; now this aesthetic has been appropriated or
adapted by many others. Her latest shops in New York and Tokyo are the complete opposite
—cluttered with wildly assymetrical and curved walls, they invoke carnival fun houses. This
rejection of conventional fashion merchandising extends to Comme des Garçons
advertising; Sherman’s photographs are only one of many examples. Kawakubo’s
catalogues feature minimal fashion content, sometimes omitting the clothing altogether and
instead employing an image meant, in an oblique way, to capture the meaning of the
collection, such as a sun ower.

In the context of Kawakubo’s destabilizing approach to the established way of doing

business in the fashion industry, her collaboration with Cindy Sherman, whose work also
undermines the “reality” of particular images, seems almost predestined. The two are well
matched in the paradoxical nature of their endeavors. Sherman is a noncommercial artist
whose work welcomes and converses with commercial appropriation. Kawakubo manages
a nancial empire in the most commercial of industries while rigorously impressing an
artistically informed sensibility on all of her products. Both Kawakubo as a fashion designer
and Sherman as an artist have used their work to question assumptions about what
constitutes self-presentation. Though their mediums and the attendant demands of their work

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are vastly different, both women subvert traditional images of and ideas about femininity.
This kinship renders the Sherman-Kawakubo collaboration a rare example of the successful
bridging of the art-commerce divide.

Jessica Glasscock, M.A. Candidate, Costume Studies, Visual Culture Program, Department
of Art and Art Professions, School of Education, New York University

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