REI KAWAKUBO / COMME DES GARÇONS — Universe of Fashion, France Grand, Universe Publishing, New York, 1998

Universe Publishing / The Vendome Press, New York, 1998. Text by France Grand; foreword by Grace Mirabella. Hardcover with illustrated dust jacket; colour and black-and-white photography throughout. 16 × 22.5 cm, 80 pages. ISBN 0-7893-0202-0.

A small book arriving immediately after Comme des Garçons had once again made the body itself negotiable.

By 1998, Rei Kawakubo no longer needed an introduction. Her first Paris runway in 1981 had helped overturn the prevailing vocabulary of Western fashion; asymmetry, holes, unfinished surfaces and displaced volumes became part of a language that other designers would spend the following decades absorbing. Then came Spring/Summer 1997: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, with padded forms inserted between garment and wearer, pushing the question beyond what clothing should look like to where a body might begin or end.

Universe of Fashion appeared the following year. That timing gives this compact monograph considerably more charge than its modest format suggests: it catches Comme des Garçons after nearly two decades of disruption in Paris, but directly after Kawakubo had proved she was still capable of destabilising the system that had already learned to celebrate her.

And then there is Grace Mirabella. The former Vogue editor-in-chief—1971 to 1988, associated with a more pragmatic and pared-back vision of American fashion—provides the foreword. The pairing is unusually good: establishment fashion publishing attempting to frame a designer whose practice had repeatedly refused its definitions.

The object behaves accordingly. The jacket gives almost everything over to white space, blunt typography and a laughing face cropped into the lower corner; inside, runway photographs, advertising imagery and aggressively scaled graphics interrupt one another rather than settling into polite chronology. It feels less like a retrospective than a compressed piece of the Comme des Garçons image machine.

The radical position, reduced to 80 pages and made portable.

Condition: very good. Light rubbing and handling to jacket; minor edge and corner wear consistent with age. Internally clean.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.