If you think “comfort” would be a key criterion for designing a good chair, you’d be wrong, if only because Rei Kawakubo exists. The avant-garde COMME des GARÇONS founder has long held the title of fashion’s Patron Saint of Form Over Function, spending decades designing clothes that often exist more as sculpture than actual day-to-day wear. 

Kawakubo once told a British newspaper that the meaning of her clothing “is that there is no meaning,” and the same applies to her foray into designing equally impractical furniture.

A lineup of Kawakubo’s chairs — minimalist, geometrically shaped objects composed of steel and wood — has just had what seems to be an annual reissue at the COMME store in Paris, after similar re-releases in 2024 and 2025.

The furniture is all very Kawakubo, and reflects the energy she’s brought to COMME and its many sub-labels.

Though she only directly designs the mainline womenswear COMME, HOMME PLUS’s elevated menswear, and a few other offshoots (plus every aspect of the architecture and interior design of her and her husband’s Dover Street Market boutiques around the world), Kawakubo’s fingerprints touch every part of the brand. As she once told Dezeen: "If my eyes aren't on it, it's not Comme des Garçons."

Nearly half a century after this underappreciated foray into “furniture” first debuted in 1983, the chairs remain a perfect addition to Kawakubo’s uniquely challenging take on design. I put that in quotes because while things like, say, the CdG x Artek collab presented stools and chairs that were conventionally useable, Kawakubo's OG line of furniture was clearly made to remind us never to expect a “chair” to be something we’re actually meant to sit in. 

You can certainly try to plant yourself down on these objects, but choose your battle wisely: One chair’s galvanized and zinc-coated steel may turn your cheeks into Swiss cheese while the hard slab of the other’s white oak seat will surely bruise your buns. Unforgiving is too soft a word for the stiff sculptural forms that Kawakubo calls chairs, yet there’s clearly a market here (partly because of their relative rarity). 

The furniture line’s original production run only lasted a decade before the chairs were relegated to sporadic reissues. With the restock comes an opportunity to literally sit with Kawakubo’s design philosophy, in which conventional ideas of form are deconstructed. As she told Design Boom in 2021: “I just wanted to create something fresh and new without the constraints of convention.” 

You may leave with more questions than you came in with, should you find yourself leaving the Paris store carrying a chair, but for the lucky few who snap one up, at least you’ll have a place to stack your freshly folded COMME.

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