Rei Kawakubo's Anti-Nike: A Conceptual Sneaker for Comme des Garçons

Rei Kawakubo, the 76-year-old Japanese fashion designer and founder of Comme des Garçons, has created a sneaker for Nike that subverts the sportswear giant's production methods. Instead of starting from a Nike shoe, Kawakubo began with her own classic black leather ankle boot and covered it with a upper featuring an oversized Swoosh. The sneaker, based on Nike's Machomai boxing boot, features visible stitching, rejecting Nike's advanced computerized design and robotic assembly. Priced at $1,300, the object is described as conceptual art destined for fashion museums and design schools. Kawakubo, who has never considered herself a pure artist, previously received a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017, an honor only given to one other living designer, Yves Saint Laurent. Her five Dover Street Market locations (London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing) are cult destinations where she sells her own products alongside those of disciples like Junya Watanabe and friends like Alaïa, Galliano, and Vetements. Nike, with $30 billion in annual revenue, has collaborated with top designers including Virgil Abloh, Kim Jones, Riccardo Tisci, and Jun Takahashi, but Kawakubo's approach is unique. New models of the Air Max 180 and Cortez lines from this collaboration will be released starting September 2018.