Rei Kawakubo Poster Design
I was deciding between Elana Schlenker and Rei Kawakubo for my design hero. I thought about Elana Schlenker because I wanted to push myself since I don’t have a lot of graphic design heros. I was drawn to the colors and playfulness of her work. However, I ended up choosing Kawakubo because she’d been my “design hero” for a long time and not only was I excited by her visual aesthetic, but also the concepts and themes behind her work as well.
- Since Rei is known to have a reclusive public personality there aren’t a lot of portraits of her, especially where she’s smiling, in color, and when from when she was young and not as established. I wanted to represent all types of portraits of her was drawn to the more “candid” portraits that encapsulated these elements in some way.
- I organized some of her runway work chronologically and tried to include the notable non-fashion design work she does like her Aoyama Storefront and her publication, Six Magazine.
- I included obvious symbols associated with her like her iconic heart PLAY logo, and her MET Gala Exhibit, Art of the In-Between. I also collected some less obvious symbols of her work like crows (since her early followers were referred to as crows due to her dark color palette), polka dots (a common motif symbolizing the theme of youth in her work), and the asterisk as the cedille in COMME des GARCONS.
- The typefaces I looked to were Helvetica since it’s what she primarily uses for Comme des Garcons (CDG) and Univers because it was used in the 80s when CDG began to flourish. I felt these sans-serif typfaces were bold, thick and minimal mimicking the style and boldness of her work.
- I also created a rough color palette. I struggled with this a bit since she has very distinct color palettes throughout her career (first primarily black, then primarily red, and now feminine pastels). I didn’t want to only acknowledge one point in her career, but I also didn’t want to just choose colors randomly.
Before I started sketching I felt I needed a story to guide me and give meaning to my visual choices. I referred to an outline of my essay that highlighted the main points of my research on Kawakubo, wrote out some rough visual guidelines I wanted to establish, and brain-dumped some ideas for individual elements of my poster.
- I wanted to emphasize Kawakubo’s reclusive personality and the way it relates to the metaphor of her bold work “speaking for itself” in my poster. With the text I wanted the emphasize the quote/ “meaning” of her work, and make her name more subtle. I also thought about how I could represent this idea of quiet confidence through the subtly of her portrait.
I tried to explore many different ways I could communicate the meaning/metaphor described above. Some common themes were:
- emphasis of the quote
- use of the Kawakubo’s bold/abstract silhouettes
- In the one on the left I plan on overlapping/cutting up a bunch of images of her/her work so that you can subtly see her face behind her work. I also plan on breaking up these visuals with polka dots, a common motif in her work
- In the one on the right I plan on using cutouts shaped like the silhouettes of her work to reveal her portrait and have the timeline and text weave through the holes.
Feedback:
- In both need to see more of her work
- silhouettes aren’t working, it’s unclear that they are silhouettes of her work, too much detail
- staggering her name is good, dynamic, would like to see that in first poster more
Though more people liked the image overlay direction I felt the concept/idea of the silhouette cutouts was stronger. I spent some time experimenting with the the silhouette cutouts (though I lost a lot of the files that documented this process) because I felt that this element dictated the direction of my layout. All the other elements felt constrained by the silhouette cutouts of my previous iteration.
Feedback:
- still can’t see a whole lot of the her work
- make her name/the type more dynamic, weave through the holes?
- the overlay of her work doesn’t work, muddy on top of the cutout frame
- handwriting contrasting with Helvetica
- deriving colors from her work
- didn’t end up using that much color for the poster, but thinking about using color palette for the booklet
- overlaying images of her work in the holes
- idea of cards: including frame of image vs. not
- breaking up close ups of her images, theme of distortion of the body using her seminal FW 1997 line “Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body”
- ^ returning to ideas from some of my original sketches
