A Collector: Duy’s Comme des Garçons Collection
Duy Pham is an art director and graphic designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Saigon, Vietnam, he studied and worked in Montreal and Toronto, Canada, before settling in Brooklyn. He nurtures a great love for Comme des Garçons and shares his wonderful collection with us below.
I honestly can’t remember exactly when I learned about Comme des Garçons, but it must have been really late, because I regret about not knowing about it earlier. It was around 2010, when I was in my last year of university. I wasn’t much into fashion or I would have been a fashionable kid like kids these days (LOL), but it just kind of blew me away because it was so anti-fashion; that you pay for something that fits so imperfectly, so mismatched, or even completely destroyed. Sweaters with so many holes, shirts with extra sleeves, pants with pockets so low you couldn’t reach it, wearing CDG clothes always seemed to feel like going through experiments to challenge your body and your preconception of what clothes should be. Fashion is a form of self-expression, and here was a brand that gave you the permission to not fit in, and that you can be the many selves you imagine yourself to be. There’s always a sense of freedom and rebellion that I feel when I wear CDG. Slowly, I started going down the rabbit hole into the CDG universe, clearly making up for all these years of ignorance!
Moving to NYC definitely opened my eyes to see and experience CDG, visiting their flagship store in Chelsea among the art galleries and making friends with other CDG collectors. One of the best experiences has been to be able to see the exhibition at The Met Museum when they put up the CDG and Rei Kawakubo retrospective. But nothing can compare to being in Tokyo and seeing CDG in action there, where there are just so many special and unique pieces you couldn’t find outside of Japan.
Collecting CDG has really trained my eyes and developed my personal aesthetic, expanding my knowledge because so much art, design, and architecture collide in the CDG world. When you see someone like Rei Kawakubo, after years and years in the business and still struggling to create clothes of newness, I think it’s just so inspiring to reflect on that in your personal work and thrive to reinvent yourself continuously.
My boyfriend and I are obsessed with CDG, and we have built our CDG collection together since we started dating. Our favorite thing to do is to try on the clothes at the stores, as well as finding pieces at vintage shops, which has been impossible to do during this pandemic. What makes NYC really special is to see people on the street, dressed not just beautifully but also daringly, so it’s always inspiring to see people wearing CDG in the subway or on a busy street. If you are bored, just hit up the CDG store or Dover Street Market, and seeing these gorgeous people wearing the most incredible garments will definitely cheer you up!
Printed Matter
As I started wearing the clothes, I became super interested in the incredible history of printed matter produced by the brand. CDG has always given artists carte blanche to use their clothes in whatever ways they envision. Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Fischli and Weiss, Marina Abramovic, among others, have created visuals for CDG. These then become the season campaigns mostly in the form of direct mail to the customers, since CDG doesn’t run regular advertising like other mainstream fashion brands. And if they do advertise in magazines, which was the case with CDG Shirt, you wouldn’t see pictures of models wearing the clothes, but amazing and often weird artworks such as this crumbled face. The lovely people at CDG Trading Museum in Tokyo still send me these mailers and it’s always a lovely surprise to open these envelopes.
One of my favorite publications is the Visionaire issue dedicated to CDG. The magazine invited Rei Kawakubo to guest edit it, and the result was stunning. Selected CDG archival pieces were paired with different photographers to be reinterpreted. There was also a life-size dress pattern printed on white muslin fabric included in the magazine box. That Nick Knight image is so major. The magazine is still the absolute best in the history of fashion image-making.
From 1988 to 1991, CDG published a magazine for each new collection called Six which stands for the “sixth sense.” They were oversized loose pages of gorgeous photographs by photographers such as Peter Lindbergh, Juergen Teller, André Kertész, Saul Leiter, to name a few, and art directed by Tsuguya Inoue. CDG books are super rare now, and harder and harder to come by. It takes a lot of time researching online and on eBay, as well as visiting used book stores, to score these treasures.
Clothing
As I mentioned above, what’s exciting about Comme des Garçons is that for every season they collaborate with an artist, well-known and outsider alike, to create graphics for the clothes, and you get to wear these really special artworks; I discovered so many incredible artists through CDG.
These are two beautiful pieces I was very lucky to own. The white vinyl vest from Fall/Winter 2015 featuring the photograph “Five Hands” by photographer Roger Ballen is just so beautiful. I found it at Tokio 7 in East Village, one of the very few places in New York where you can find vintage CDG. The shirt with the doll collage graphics is a collaboration with textile artist Mona Luison for Spring/Summer 2018. I bought it at the Trading Museum, a concept store by Comme des Garçons to showcase their previous collections, mostly collectible items, as well as special collaborations with other designers and brands. The concept is pretty similar to Dover Street Market, but a lot tighter and more unique in terms of curation and selection, basically a museum where everything is housed in antique display vitrines. I asked the salesperson who was wearing a stunning coat from the same season to take a picture with me; she was just so kawaii!!! If you are in Tokyo, you definitely have to check it out!
Necklace
This gold-chain necklace with plastic mouthpieces might be the most insane thing I had ever collected. It was part of the Spring/Summer 2019 collection. There are 3 small mouths and 1 large mouth, all of different animals; I am pretty sure it’s of a tiger, a bear, a dog, and you could wear it either way. When I first saw it at the Comme des Garçons store, I thought it was so crazy and powerful, almost like an amulet or a talisman. I don’t think I’d ever wear it outside, because it is really intimidating, mostly for me (LOL), but again that is definitely a very CDG effect, pushing you out of your comfort zone, as well as everyone around you. For now, it is sitting inside this glass cabinet like a good pet.
Perfume
You can’t talk about Comme des Garçons as a conceptual and avant-garde fashion house without talking about their perfume collection, or really anti-perfume. Everything from the scents and the bottles to the packaging graphics and the copywriting is smart and sophisticated, and offers so many wearable identities, just like the clothes. They are known to marry the organic with the synthetic, with many series combining unexpected smells incorporating man-made places or daily life materials. As a designer, I am especially drawn to the graphics and the packaging, which uses every possible combination and iteration of their house font Helvetica. The bottles are usually shrink-wrapped in plastic and housed in cheap cardboard boxes, which is so anti-luxury!!! My favorite is the deformed bottle of eau de parfum that looks like melted glass.
The perfume note reads “We can find beautiful things without consciousness. A fragrance that couldn’t exist in a bottle that shouldn’t exist. What qualifies anything for the right to exist? Who has the right to decide what should be rejected? Purposely taking a bottle that has been disqualified from existence and purposefully giving it its right to exist. Aldehydes, Safraleine, Hawthorns, Lilac Flower oxides, Industrial glue, Brown sticky tape, Musk, Styrax.” Who doesn’t want to smell like industrial glue and brown sticky tape?
The scent I’ve worn the longest and always come back to is their collaboration with Monocle called Scent One: Hinoki. I was once told that I smelled like a Christmas tree wearing this scent 😀
Text and Photography by Duy Pham