By ITEM IDEM

The term “Mikado,” while commonly referring to the Western game of pick-up sticks, was formerly the title of the Japanese emperor. Today it feels like an adequate designation for Rei Kawakubo, and her unique way of challenging our time with appropriate answers to still-unasked questions. Her company, Comme des Garçons, continues to radically defy the convention and command of the art of strategy with its latest retail effort, “Louis Vuitton at Comme des Garçons.” Operated and initiated by Kawakubo, the collaboration provokes the notion of branding itself with the observed renouncement of some of Comme’s own codes and the entrance into an environment almost entirely dedicated to the luxury goods empire.

As a reminder of Comme’s pioneering practice in diverse areas of contemporary culture, it would be unfair to diminish the label to retail science only. As early as the ’80s, it was exhibiting artwork in its shops from the likes of Daniel Buren, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Cindy Sherman, and Jesús Rafael Soto, as well as expanding the visual universe with its magazine Six. In the ’00s, always forward-thinking and beyond, Kawakubo nicked from the street and developed the guerrilla concept, forever twisting the idea of location, stocks, and advertisements with various viral methods. Simultaneously, as many began re-editing her gestures with greater mass-market appeal, she began to handle the retail sphere itself as a laboratory. Instead of simply displaying art, Comme collaborated with concept store Colette and Belgian architect/sculptor Jan de Cock, and started showing products in/on/inside of artworks. Then came the re-invention of the department store and corner shop with the Dover Street Market, and finally the Paris Comme des Garçons POCKET stores, which re-brand the modernist heirs of her guerrilla concept.

But Comme’s latest installment is more about renouncement and a sapient denial of the brand’s ego with pacifying reflection. At a time when heavily marketed strategies that globalize all things artistic and political are easily discreditable – think: Louis Vuitton campaigns featuring Francis Ford Coppola or Mikhail Gorbachev – Kawakubo orients anti-establishment rebellion towards necessary discussion and communion. “I have finally done it,” she tells WWD with simple candor, making one wonder whether it’s the peak of a career or another way of simply re-inventing herself.

It’s quite disconcerting at first, but certainly not astonishing coming a few months after announcing a collaboration with low-price retail giant H&M. It’s clearly a way to lead the cortege astray and display an open mind in an industry so cowardly self-obsessed. Kawakubo is paving the way to potentially similar and wider collaborations, expanding on the entire spectrum of the industry.

The product designs, or “party bags,” for the Vuitton collaboration challenge aficionados’ expectations to frustration, and only the few that appreciate her work for its simple conceptualism will understand the strength of her minimal response – it’s all about containment. Avoiding the easy trick of reworking the monogram, Kawakubo’s intervention targets a higher appreciation beyond the easy aesthetic branding characterized by other Louis Vuitton collaborators. Here, the bags are simplified and play with easily recognizable codes (especially intriguing is the “Papillon with animal charms” bag, which toys with the notorious “Kawaii” aesthetic). They stretch functional research to the absurd, with the asymmetrical design, which made Kawakubo most infamous, manifested in a bag whose two handles become one.

Rather than unveiling easily expected solutions, Rei Kawakubo is unfolding the force of her practice with an extreme delicacy and conciliating attitude. Spanning the fashion world from one extreme to the other, Comme des Garçons’ wise and skilled origami mastership are here becoming legend magnified.