For the second time in history (since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983), the New York Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute has put up a retrospective dedicated to a living fashion designer.
Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between unravels around one of the most gifted and obscure designers in the world, who climbed up the fashion olympus back in the Eighties thanks to her extravagant, so-called “post-atomic” style that openly clashed with lurid chromatic palettes and opulent golden finishes so common at that cheekily baroque time.
Open to public from 4 May to 4 September, 2017, the exhibition is an explorative journey into Kawakubo’s love for space-inhabiting clothes and aesthetic sensitivity, which delves deep into a visually ambiguous ground where the more traditional concepts of beauty, good taste and fashionability are disturbingly challenged.
Definitely a far cry from classic retrospectives, the expo invites visitors to think of the fashion world as a place of tireless creativity exceeding mere clothes design and manufacturing, and instead giving shape to our age’s aesthetic nature.
On display, more than 150 examples of Kawakubo’s designs for Comme des Garçons – the brand she originally founded in 1969 – from the 80’s to her latest collection.
Unfolding into nine themes of dualisms (including Absence/Presence, High/Low, Fashion/Antifashion and Object/Subject, Design/Not Design, Clothes/Not Clothes, Then/Now, Self/Other, Model/Multiple), the Japanese designer shakes up all of the above, showing the public how arbitrary and artificial such categories are.
Her fashions demonstrate that interstices are places of meaningful connection and coexistence as well as revolutionary innovation and transformation, providing Kawakubo with endless possibilities to rethink the female body and feminine identity.
“I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design...by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm”, Kawakubo explains.
“And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion...imbalance... unfinished... elimination...and absence of intent.”
Opening photo: Open to public from 4 may to 4 september, 2017, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: art of the in-between pays homage to the Japanese designer and her aesthetic sensitivity from the 80s to now.
