This week's New Yorker has an fantastic profile (by Judith Thurman) of Rei Kawakubo and her reinvention of fashion with her Commes des Garcons line. Noted:
There are few women who have exerted more influence on the history of modern fashion, and the most obvious, Chanel, is in some respects her perfect foil: the racy courtesan who invented a uniform of irreproachable chic and the gnomic shaman whose anarchic chic is a reproach to uniformity. They both started from an egalitarian premise: that a woman should derive from her clothes the ease and confidence that a man does. But Chanel formulated a few simple and lucrative principles, from which she never wavered, that changed the way women wanted to dress, while Kawakubo, who reinvents the wheel -- or tries to -- every season, changed the way one thinks about what dress is.
It's not available online, but that article alone is well worth the cover price.
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