Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo on 11 October 1942, the eldest of three children and the only daughter of an administrator at Keio University. She never trained formally in fashion. Instead she studied at Keio, graduating in 1964 with a degree in the history of aesthetics that took in both Asian and Western art. She worked in the advertising department of the textile company Asahi Kasei and became a freelance stylist in 1967.
In 1969 she began designing and making clothes under the name Comme des Garçons, "like the boys", incorporating the company in 1973 and opening her first boutique in Tokyo in 1975. Menswear followed in 1978. By 1980 the company had some 150 franchised shops in Japan. In 1981 she began showing in Paris, opening a boutique there in 1982.
Her early Paris collections caused an uproar. Largely black, grey or white, draped around the body with frayed, unfinished edges, holes and asymmetry, they challenged conventional notions of beauty; critics reached for phrases such as "Hiroshima chic", and the Japanese press nicknamed her followers "the crows". Kawakubo described the ambition plainly: "to start from zero, from nothing, to do things that have not been done before". Her palette widened from the late 1980s, but the conceptual rigour has remained.
She treats every part of the business as one vision, involving herself in graphics, advertising and shop interiors, such as the Aoyama store designed with Future Systems. In the early 1990s she published her own image-led magazine, Six; in 1993 she launched Comme des Garçons Parfums with Adrian Joffe. The house has fostered designers including Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara under its name, and collaborated widely, from Nike, Converse and Fred Perry to Louis Vuitton, Supreme and, in 2008, H&M.
In 2004 she opened Dover Street Market in London, a multi-brand store run on Comme des Garçons principles of display and discovery; it has since opened in Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, New York and Los Angeles, and has championed emerging talent.
Designers from Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester to Helmut Lang have been cited as influenced by her, and Alexander McQueen spoke of her as a reason to be in fashion at all. In May 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute opened Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between as an austere white maze of some 150 ensembles. Business of Fashion reported revenue for the group and its affiliates of more than $280 million a year.
Well into her eighties she continues to show in Paris each season. Her Fall 2026 womenswear show, in March 2026, began with sixteen all-black looks, each a vast abstract envelopment textured with shirring, ruching, tulle and spidery embroidery, so broad that models had to step aside for one another on the runway. Then, in silence, came six of the same shapes in the most saccharine pink. Her note for the season read: "In the end, there is black. Ultimately Black. I have come to realize that, after all, black is the color for me. It's just the strongest, the best for creation, and the color that embodies the rebellious spirit." Vogue's Luke Leitch observed that each look held "more technical complexity and visual surprise than is sometimes found in entire collections elsewhere", and that the forms were abstract enough for each viewer to project meaning onto them. "As so often at Comme des Garçons," he wrote, "this show was about generating questions."
She remains famously reticent with the press, preferring, as she has long maintained, that the work speak for itself.