Some people think that Marc Jacobs is the most influential designer on the planet, but the man whose creations make billions for Louis Vuitton would beg to differ. According to him, that title belongs to Rei Kawakubo, the low-key Japanese designer behind the cult label Comme des Garçons.

“Jil Sander is influenced by Comme des Garçons. Miuccia Prada is influenced by Comme des Garçons.

Everyone is influenced by Comme des Garçons,” says Jacobs, who often sends Kawakubo flowers with little notes saying “Thank you for the inspiration”.

In a world where big labels set their sights on creating the season’s super-expensive must-haves – cashmere jumpsuits, fur-trimmed stilettos, snakeskin bikinis – Kawakubo stands very much apart. She is truly a designer’s designer. As the fashion aficionado Cathy Horyn recently wrote, she works “more in the spirit of an artist than any other designer working today”.

Like many artists, Kawakubo is elusive. She hates talking about her work, believing that the clothes should speak for themselves. As a result, she rarely does interviews, often giving one-word explanations or even drawing a circle on a piece of white paper as a response.

“With all collections, I start abstractedly,” she says of her method. “I try to find two or three disparate themes, and think about techniques to express them not in a straight way. This is always the longest part of the process. I spend the most time on it because I am looking for things that don’t exist. It is like working on a Zen koan [riddle].”

Kawakubo’s approach to work is singular. She is famously secretive, installing curtains in her studio to hide prototypes from colleagues. Her Tokyo HQ is an anonymous office block that she shares with her design protégés, Junya Watanabe, Tao and Ganryu. She founded the company in 1969, but it came to prominence only in 1981 in Paris, when she shocked the fashion establishment with her all-black clothes and distressed fabrics that some critics dubbed “Hiroshima chic”.

Her distorted shapes and commitment to flat shoes also challenged conventional ideas of sexiness. By the end of the 1980s, black had become the fashion uniform, all the cool kids wore flats and Kawakubo had established herself as queen of the avant-garde. Even today, it is said that if she finds an employee wearing high heels, they are immediately sent to the nearest store to buy a pair of Converse sneakers.

Nearly 30 years after she started her label, her approach is still a rarity in fashion. She is, in a sense, the opposite of a designer such as Tom Ford: not interested in celebrity front rows, she doesn’t do trends and would never reference another designer’s work.

“I mostly work from things within,” says Kawakubo, who might be inspired by a single word, the way someone is sitting or even how a bedspread has been folded. “Everything I make comes out of my own sense of values. I’m interested in the lives of many people, but I am mostly influenced by the time I have spent living and the air that I have breathed.”

The resulting designs always fuel debate. Her latest collection, Cacophonie, is one of her most mystifying, featuring outfits such as a jumpsuit made entirely of rectangular pink rosettes, a frothy tutu attached to the front of a pair of cycling shorts, and cute paper-dolly dresses made from foam and superimposed on the front of an outfit.

“This time, I started out thinking about disharmony and randomness, playing with weird and unlikely mixes of fabrics, colours and patterns on the one hand, and working with shapes [in this case, bags] that are not clothes on the other hand,” she explains. “The entire collection on this level was built on the plain, flat rectangular bag.”

“She makes a profit in order to do something new,” comments her friend Sonia Park, a Tokyo stylist. Indeed, CDG sales totalled £92.6m last year. Her perfume business is also booming, and so are the Comme guerrilla stores that pop up in places such as Berlin and LA, only to disappear again after a year. The jewel in her retail crown is the eclectic Dover Street Market in London, a fashion mecca where the quirky T-shirt label Wasting My Time sells alongside modern greats, including Lanvin, and the edgy trendsetters Christopher Kane and Gareth Pugh. “It’s a store where the overall atmosphere of beautiful chaos is as important as the things that are in it,” Kawakubo says.

Comme des Garçons is unlike any other fashion entity. At every level, from the catwalk shows to the stores and the things that they sell, it consistently boggles, baffles and amazes. Its success, in an increasingly corporate, standardised fashion world, really is something to celebrate.

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