Adrian Joffe: “Six Is New Again”

First published in 1988, Rei Kawakubo’s cult Comme des Garçons magazine Six was a surreal exploration of the sixth sense. Now, 35 years after its final issue, it returns in a new installation at Dover Street Market London

In 1988, Rei Kawakubo launched Six, Comme des Garçons’ now-cult publication named for the sixth sense, which ran to eight issues before ending in 1991. It was distributed free to customers and trade press, its supersized pages loose and unbound in the first two issues. This week, Six – “new again” – comes to Dover Street Market London, filling its windows and ground floor, and, a day earlier, to the Comme des Garçons store in Aoyama, Tokyo. Both follow a first iteration in the courtyard of Dover Street Market Paris in March. “It’s three in the world,” says Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International. “There won’t be any others.”

Six was, by design, difficult to define – only the categorising eye of hindsight has pinned it somewhere between a concept magazine and a company catalogue. Tsuguya Inoue, a graphic designer who came up through advertising, was behind the layouts, and has described Six to Tokyo Weekender as “the most playful publication I have ever worked on as an art director.” Across its pages, images corresponded by analogy: Karl Blossfeldt’s plant studies held against sculptural hats; Gisèle Freund’s portrait of Jean Cocteau, seen through a die-cut hole onto a Shinji Mori campaign image, so that the late poet appears to wear Homme Plus; John Malkovich, photographed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, in more than one issue. The fourth issue arrived as a vast photographic portfolio – Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Saul Leiter and Peter Lindbergh (whose pages would outnumber anyone else’s across all eight issues).

“‘Six’ is the sixth sense,” ran a few unsigned lines in the first issue. “It is the sense of the surreal. Although the sixth sense is impossible to describe, ‘flair’ may be one aspect of this sense.” Thirty-five years after its last issue, Joffe frames it in terms of making: Six, he says, “is talking about the sixth sense, and about creation in art – expressing new ideas through collage and curation.”

This year, Six returned to the form it began in: printed matter, sent to clients. Comme des Garçons’ direct mail for 2026 – the “DMs”, as the house calls them – reprints Six’s covers and archive pages alongside work by photographers such as Jack Davison and Flor Garduño, and has been sent only to clients in Paris, London and Japan. “Six is new again,” Joffe explains. “We decided to work with the archives of Six, and use new images in the spirit of Six, chosen by Rei Kawakubo.” Joffe’s phrase has history: on the same spread as its definition of the sixth sense, the first issue had observed, perhaps drily, that “prefixing ‘new’ to words used to be a fad in Japan.” The installations are the mailers’ spatial translations, staged in the same three places they were sent.

In London, Kawakubo has conceived a new design for the Haymarket windows and ground floor, timed to coincide with Frieze London – the first time the store has given Six such embracing scale since moving there in 2016. “Every installation is adapted to the physicality of the store,” Joffe says. In Paris, the images wrapped the tubular structures of the courtyard; in Aoyama, bands of black-and-white collage encircle the building’s columns, beneath the canopy outside and continuing behind the glass within.

Six by Comme des Garçons is on view at Dover Street Market London for one month from 13 October. An accompanying collection of 12 T-shirt styles, ordinarily available only at Trading Museum Comme des Garçons in Tokyo, is available in store