By Jussara Da Silva
There are few ideas in fashion that feel more permanent than beauty.
Every collection is measured against it. Every season asks whether something is beautiful enough, desirable enough, elegant enough. We speak about beautiful tailoring, beautiful fabrics, beautiful women, beautiful campaigns with such confidence that the word itself begins to disappear. It becomes so familiar that we rarely stop to ask what we actually mean by it.
Perhaps that is because beauty has always disguised itself as certainty.
Every generation believes it has finally discovered what beauty looks like. One era celebrates symmetry, another sensuality. One admires softness, another sharpness. Sometimes beauty is found in ornament, sometimes in restraint. Yet each generation quietly assumes that its own definition is somehow universal, as though beauty exists independently of history rather than being shaped by it.
Fashion has reinforced this illusion for centuries.
It has repeatedly presented beauty as an answer.
Rei Kawakubo asks us to consider whether beauty was always meant to be a question.
This is what makes her work so significant.
Not because she rejected beauty, as she is often described, but because she questioned the narrowness of the definitions we had inherited. Her collections never argued that beauty should disappear. They asked whether we had become too comfortable believing that we already knew where beauty could be found.
When Comme des Garçons presented its collections in Paris during the early 1980s, many critics struggled to understand what stood before them. Garments appeared unfinished. Black dominated collections at a time when Paris still associated luxury with polish and refinement. Silhouettes abandoned familiar proportions. Fabrics looked worn rather than perfected. The body was no longer treated as something that clothing existed to idealise.
To many observers, it appeared as though fashion itself had been turned inside out.
The criticism was immediate.
The collections were described as unfinished, even ugly. Some critics dismissed them as though they represented the rejection of everything fashion had spent decades trying to achieve.
Yet perhaps the collections were never rejecting beauty.
Perhaps they were exposing how limited our understanding of beauty had become.
There is an important difference between those two ideas.
Throughout the history of art, the works that initially unsettled audiences have often become the very works that transformed culture. Impressionist paintings were criticised because they appeared incomplete. Cubism was dismissed because it abandoned realistic representation. Modern architecture was condemned for removing ornament. Again and again, history reminds us that innovation rarely arrives looking familiar.
The discomfort belongs not to the work itself.
It belongs to the viewer encountering something their eyes have not yet learned to understand.
Fashion follows the same pattern.
We often imagine that our taste belongs entirely to us. We believe we instinctively know whether something is elegant, balanced or attractive. Yet our eyes are educated long before we believe they are independent. Films, magazines, advertising, family, culture and the fashions of our own generation quietly teach us what deserves admiration long before we ever believe we are making our own judgments.
Taste often feels personal.
Its origins rarely are.
This is why Rei Kawakubo’s work remains intellectually important decades after it first appeared.
She reminds us that fashion is capable of doing something more profound than producing beautiful objects.
It can reveal the boundaries of our own perception.
Her distorted silhouettes, unexpected volumes and asymmetrical constructions are not simply aesthetic experiments. They are questions made visible. They interrupt habits of looking that have become so familiar we mistake them for truth.
The body no longer exists merely to display ideal proportions.
The garment no longer exists merely to flatter.
Beauty no longer exists merely to comfort.
Instead, clothing becomes a place where perception itself is examined.
This changes the role of the designer entirely.
Rather than confirming what we already believe, Kawakubo asks us to participate in the act of seeing. Her collections require patience. They refuse immediate satisfaction because immediate satisfaction often depends upon familiar expectations. They invite curiosity before approval.
That invitation is perhaps her greatest contribution.
Many people encounter her work and instinctively ask, Do I like this?
It is an understandable question.
But it may also be the least interesting one.
A more revealing question would be, Why does this feel unfamiliar?
Or perhaps even more importantly,
Who taught me that beauty was supposed to look different?
That is where the real conversation begins.
The value of Kawakubo’s work has never depended upon convincing everyone that her collections are beautiful.
Its value lies in demonstrating that beauty itself is not fixed.
It evolves because we evolve.
Every expansion of beauty begins with someone willing to question its previous limits.
In this sense, Rei Kawakubo’s legacy reaches far beyond fashion.
We live in a culture that increasingly rewards certainty. We are encouraged to form immediate opinions, to decide quickly whether something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, worthy or unworthy. Algorithms reward instant reactions. Social media encourages immediate judgment. There is very little patience for uncertainty.
Yet some of the most meaningful experiences in life begin with confusion.
The book that challenges us.
The piece of music that takes years to appreciate.
The work of art that refuses to explain itself.
The person we initially misunderstand.
Growth often begins where certainty ends.
Perhaps this is why I continue returning to Rei Kawakubo’s work.
Not because I believe every collection must be admired.
Not because fashion should abandon conventional beauty.
But because she reminds me that the purpose of great creative work is not always to reassure us that what we already believe is correct.
Sometimes its purpose is to gently dismantle the assumptions we did not realise we were carrying.
There is something deeply hopeful about that.
If beauty is learned, it can also be relearned.
If perception is shaped, it can also be expanded.
If our understanding of elegance, creativity and even ourselves has been inherited, then it is never beyond reconsideration.
Perhaps that is the greatest lesson Rei Kawakubo offers us.
Not that imperfection is more beautiful than perfection.
But that beauty has always been larger than the definitions we inherited.
And perhaps the most beautiful minds are not the ones that recognise beauty the fastest.
They are the ones that never stop learning where beauty might still be found.
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