Comme des Garçons: The Shape of Things to Come
A few months ahead of her solo exhibition at the Met museum in New York, Rei Kawakubo presented a surreal women’s wear collection that reflected today’s tense political atmosphere and fashion’s identity crisis.
Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo just pulled off another epic runway show in Paris. The mastermind behind iconic fashion brand Comme des Garçons is the first living designer since 1983 to showcase a solo retrospective at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Entitled Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between (on May 4 until September 4, 2017) the show will also mark her as the first living female fashion designer to exhibit solo at the museum.
Curator Andrew Bolton explains that Kawakubo, widely considered as one of the most relevant and forward-thinking female designers since her debut in Paris in the early 80s, confesses that she never thought of her work as a trend-focused creative expression. In fact, her boundary-pushing take on fashion seems to come naturally, almost instinctively.
“What I’ve only ever been interested in are clothes that one has never seen before, that are completely new, and how in what way they can be expressed. Is that called fashion? I don’t know the answer,” she told Bolton.
The designer’s show for autumn/winter 2017-18 was yet another proof that Kawakubo’s work goes beyond the definition of fashion as we know it, blurring the divide between contemporary art and ready-to-wear in order to reflect on notions of identity, spirituality, beauty and body, and ultimately raising existential questions about fashion.
