Comme des Garçons Superfans Explain Why They Dress the Way They Do

Comme des Garçons superfans make the best side of the weird, wild world of fashion go round. The brand, built from the ground up by Rei Kawakubo since 1969, hosts its show and the others in its universe, including Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya, on the final Saturday of Paris Fashion Week. Industry insiders fondly dub it “Japan Day.” And it’s one of the few occasions when the street style is truly unbridled. Yesterday, for instance, there were neon orange tutus shooting out from gold jackets, mountains of pink ruffles protruding from satin jackets, and, of course, ample amounts of black via amorphous, bulbous abstraction. In the ultimate fandom tribute, longtime fan Ciara walked the Junya Watanabe runway while pregnant.

The devotees who wear Comme des Garçons wear it for different reasons, but they often wear it for life, like the London-based street style star Katie Ruensumran, who initially discovered the brand by way of her father when she was a kid in the ’90s. Her first purchase was a black skirt, which she still has to this day. “More than anything, Comme gives you freedom,” she tells ELLE. “Freedom to dress, to play, to be yourself and not worry too much about what clothes are ‘supposed’ look like on you. That’s what I love most about wearing it.”

Likewise, a usual outfit for Ruensumran consists of poufy neon tulle, statement dresses, and iconoclastic boleros often in shades of hot pink, Kelly green, or cherry red from the CDG universe. “Apart from the great design, color, and everything else, as a plus-size girl, Comme des Garçons clothes make me feel confident,” she adds. “The shapes work so well for me and somehow the design always feels just right.”

Still, Ruensumran doesn’t plan her outfits for Japan Day in advance. She’d rather mix new and old pieces from her wardrobe based on how she feels. But others do, like Angie and Wayne Wu, arguably the most documented couple who wear the label. Based in New York, the duo devotes a room to their outsize, unusual garments from Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, and Noir Kei Ninomiya. They’ve been married for over 23 years and share their favorite pieces. They also meticulously plot their outfits to complement each other on show day, donning a different look for each respective show. “We do try to do something complementary to each other,” says Wayne, moments before the Noir Kei Ninomiya show.

Angie works in health care, and Wayne works as a graphic designer; he was the first one to discover CDG and in turn inspired Angie. His first purchase was a pair of black balloon pants. Now over 90 percent of their wardrobe is Comme des Garçons-dominated. “Some of them don’t have armholes; some of them are really difficult to kind of move around in,” says Angie. “It’s so fun to experience. We wear everything that we have in the everyday. So, it’s not like occasional dressing.” Adds Wayne, “I feel like it’s like a second skin.” They describe the feeling of wearing the most extreme, runway-forward Comme des Garçons outfits as joyous rather than transformational.

“It changed my life,” says Lauren Amos, the Atlanta-based, longtime Comme superfan behind the boutique Antidote, of her first piece. “It changed my work; it changed the way that I saw the world, and it gave me a lot of hope and excitement.” She first discovered the world of Comme des Garçons in 2004, when she saw images of a Junya Watanabe collection in a magazine. She frantically searched for the pieces, calling every shop she could think of around the country, before finding pieces at the then-radical downtown shop Jeffrey New York.

Amos eventually discovered the pieces of Comme des Garçons and made them a staple of her own personal wardrobe and a fixture of her boutique. She began her career in the sneaker world with her shop Wish ATL and describes her early CDG outfits as being “intoxicatingly powerful and freeing” as someone who worked in a male-dominated space. Like Ruensumran, she also appreciates Kawakubo’s work as it relates to the body. “I think, as all women, we struggle with our body, and it gave me somewhere to put my body into this form,” she says. “I got to become part of a sculpture. It allowed me to take up space spiritually, physically, emotionally. I was willing to do that for the first time in my life.” Today, she has multiples of the pieces she likes best, like some of the dresses from Comme des Garçons’s fall/winter 2016 collection. “It feels like self-definition,” she shares, of wearing her most extreme garments.

Some of the collectors, like the Wus, even give their most extreme pieces names. “There’s kind of a humor to that as well,” Angie says. “Like the tattered flower thing, the lantern, the milk box, the turtle, olive.” For others, the appeal of the brand is that it’s a total look and needs nothing else.

Interestingly, almost every single person we interviewed mentioned the word “freedom” when it came to wearing Comme des Garçons. And that says it all.