Japan’s ‘crow tribe’ is the reason everyone started wearing black in New York
From the streets, to the catwalk, and back
Everyone else was wearing shoulder pads and bold work suits. At aerobics class, they stretched into a pair of bright pink stirrup leggings. On the weekends, preps draped crewneck sweaters over their shoulders. Hair was big and crispy with product.
The “crows” wore black. Their pants were heavy and swallowed their legs. Turtlenecks and scarves bundled up to their straight, sleek hair. Choppy bangs shrouded their dark eye makeup. Inspired by the aesthetics of the British punk movement, the karasu-zoku (crow tribe) boldly rejected the cliche, hairsprayed 1980s look, with its blazing glamour, sex, and deep V-necks.
On the other hand, their looks weren’t exactly DIY. The karasu were followers of fashion’s biggest emerging names. In fact, they spearheaded a decade-long style obsession known as “DC burando,” or “designer and character brands,” heavy on high-fashion avant-garde.
But for all their explosive popularity, Japan’s DC fashion houses refused to be boxed in. On the contrary, designers like Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Rei Kawakubo spurned tradition and conformity. Their “new look” silhouettes were androgynous, asymmetrical, and utterly unpredictable in shape. Skirts sagged heavy toward the ankles; sleeves were slashed open and tied in distracted bows; expensive fabrics were crushed and wrinkled.
The catwalk creations were uncomfortable to witness. They represented destruction, rejection, and despair. Yet they struck a cord. Even when fans couldn’t necessarily swaddle themselves in bolts of gray wool, they took away a common theme: darkness, and through it, emancipation.
In the 1970s, Kawakubo began by making clothes for a woman “who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.” She was already using blacks and had amassed a devout “crow” following in Tokyo. Her label, Commes des Garçons, translates to “like the boys,” though the designer insists she merely chose the name for its lyrical beauty.
But by the early 1980s, Kawakubo was unsatisfied with her work. It wasn’t enough to create denim apron skirts and designs inspired by Japanese peasants. She sought something that would totally disrupt — something entirely new.
In 1982, a collection she named “Destroy” utterly flabbergasted Paris. While everyone in pop culture drooled over Versace, Kawakubo debuted a giant middle finger. Compared to the standard ’80s dazzle and sex, the Commes des Garçons collection was ashy, modest, lumpy, and even dowdy at first glance. One black sweater had been punched with holes, which Kawakubo branded her custom “lace.”
Criticism was reductive and culturally insensitive. Women’s Wear Daily called it the “Hiroshima bag lady look,” and the Associated Press proclaimed Kawakubo the “high priestess of the Jap wrap.” In fact, her craftsmanship was revolutionary; instead of tailoring to show off a woman’s body, the designer had stitched a series of sculptures around her. All of a sudden, the wearer was part of the art itself. It was for her, and no one else.
Tokyo’s crow tribe had understood this message for several years. The karasu-zoku wore black from head to toe. Sometimes they belted their figures, but often they layered flaps of material around their torsos in deliberate contortions. Other times, coats hung straight down their bodies like a ruler. Collared capes and black bustled skirts lent a witchy, vampirical flavor. Gone was the scrappy bohemianism of the 1970s. Karasu identified with specific designers and their messages, and their insistence on a completely “new look” from the fashion establishment solidified Tokyo as an international beacon of sophistication.
After Kawakubo upended Paris, downtown trendsetters the world over donned black wardrobes. The Tokyo crow aesthetic, which had supported Commes des Garçons in its earliest years, became an international fad. Some believe Kawakubo is singlehandedly responsible for the all-black New York City uniform that defined the art world in the 1980s, and continued (mostly as cliche) into the early 2000s. Others insist she all but invented the color. “What she objectively achieved was the revival of black’s cachet as the color of refusal,” wrote Judith Thurman for The New Yorker.
“I never intended to start a revolution,” Kawakubo told the magazine in 2005. “I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”
The karasu-zoku at this time were more than happy to save up for the art world new look and its hefty designer price tag. Credit cards were becoming pervasive in Japan at the time, as demand for homespun avant-garde grew in Tokyo’s bustling fashion neighborhood of Harajuku. There, the crows were among the first style tribes to popularize street style, a phenomenon still thriving today.
“Japan had not just ‘caught up’ to American fashion by the mid-1980 — Tokyo’s fashion scene far exceeded the sophistication ever seen in the U.S.,” wrote W. David Marx in Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (2015).
Every season after her breakout collection, Kawakubo, now 74 years old, reinvented the Commes des Garçons vision. It’s what makes her one of fashion’s untouchables. And though she and the crows soon incorporated more color, darkness is never far. Pain and loss continue to permeate her art. When Commes designs aren’t black cocoons, they’re bulbous tumors, spectral brides, bloated organs, and bound figures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute currently houses a retrospective, only the second time it has spotlighted a living designer, after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.
In the museum gift shop in New York City, Kawakubo’s iconic black “lace” sweater is still for sale.
