Rei Kawakubo

Most of the 1980s on this site is about more: bigger shoulders, brighter colours, more shine, more logos. Rei Kawakubo is the great exception. When she brought Comme des Garçons to Paris in 1981, she showed clothes that seemed to reject every idea of what a fashionable woman should look like - and she ended up influencing fashion more deeply than almost anyone else of her generation.

She came to fashion without any formal training. Born in Tokyo in 1942, she studied art history and aesthetics at Keio University, then worked in the advertising department of a textile company and as a freelance stylist. She started making clothes herself because she couldn't find the ones she wanted for her shoots, launching the Comme des Garçons label in 1969 and founding the company in 1973. By the end of the 1970s it was successful in Japan, with a devoted following of young women who wore head-to-toe black.

In 1981 she showed in Paris for the first time, alongside Yohji Yamamoto, and her autumn/winter 1982-83 collection, shown in March 1982, caused a sensation. The models wore flat shoes and little make-up. The clothes were loose, wrapped, and layered, mostly in black and grey, with uneven hems, knitwear deliberately full of holes, and fabrics that looked crumpled or worn. The press was stunned and often hostile, calling it "Hiroshima chic" or "post-atomic" - a lazy and offensive label, but a sign of how completely the clothes broke with Western ideas of glamour. The holey sweaters, sometimes called the "lace" sweaters, were made by loosening parts of the knitting machine so that it skipped stitches at random, and they're one of the first great examples of deconstruction in fashion.

What Kawakubo was questioning was the whole point of fashionable clothing in the 1980s: that it should show off a sexy, toned body, signal money, and look finished and perfect. Her clothes did none of that. They hid the body, they looked imperfect on purpose, and they asked to be taken seriously as ideas. For me, she's the most important counterpoint to power dressing: a completely different answer to the question of how a modern, independent woman should dress. Black became the uniform of architects, artists, and fashion insiders by the end of the decade, and she did much to make it so. She has kept pushing boundaries ever since, and her influence on designers who followed, from the Belgian designers of the mid-to-late 1980s onward, is enormous.