Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons at The Met

Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons at The Met
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The Costume Institute’s spring 2017 exhibition examines the work of fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. The thematic show features approximately 140 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection, many with heads and wigs created and styled by Julien d’Ys.

 

 

The galleries illustrate the designer’s revolutionary experiments in “in-betweenness”—the space between boundaries. Objects are organized into nine aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo’s work:
Absence/Presence
Design/Not Design
Fashion/Anti-Fashion
Model/Multiple
Then/Now
High/Low
Self/Other
Object/Subject
Clothes/Not Clothes.

Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between
The Met, Fifth Avenue, New York
4 May – 4 Sept 2017

[More info: The Met]

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