Petal Dress in White

With its ground-breaking Paris debut in 1981, Comme des Garçons introduced deconstruction, asymmetry, and monochromatic color schemes as a new paradigm for conceptual fashion, bringing Japanese avant-garde to the West. Since then, Rei Kawakubo's designs have retained a reputation for their radical "anti-fashion" style and frequent explorations into gender fluidity—their propensity for pushing and redefining the parameters of what constitutes beauty and what is considered to be fashionable.