Decoding her work, Rei Kawakubo once said Comme des Garçons is about proposing a ‘new beauty”. Her creations for almost five decades have celebrated art, defied fashion norms and set new parameters of ‘beauty’.
Born in Japan in 1942, Rei Kawakubo studied fine arts and started off as a stylist. For her editorials, she was on a look out for work which could stimulate thought. The lack of it prompted her to launch her own brand ‘Comme des Garçons’ in 1969.
Owing to the popularity of her unconventional pieces Rei was already a force to reckon with in Japan. In 1975 she launched her own boutique in Tokyo and by 1978 she also ventured into menswear by introducing Homme Comme des Garçons. She made her Paris debut in 1981 and soon her creations become generation-defining pieces.
The very reclusive, Rei over the years has expanded her business and inspired fashion titans such as Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Helmut Lang. According to the website, ‘Business Of Fashion’, Comme des Garçons and it’s affiliates which include at least 20 different lines churn an annual revenue of $ 280 million.
This year Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute chose the ingenious, Rei Kawakubo as a subject of its annual exhibit. Titled ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between’ is on view from May 4 through September 4. A thematic exhibition, rather than a traditional retrospective, this is The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.
Speaking about the influence of Rei Kawakubo on fashion, Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute said that ‘Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years. By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity. She has defined the aesthetics of our time.”
The exhibition features approximately 140 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear designs for Comme des Garçons, dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection. The exhibit opens with five red garments from her memorable Spring/Summer 1997 collection. Titled “Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body”, Rei through this collection challenged the physical stereotypes that are associated with women,
The objects in the exhibit have been organized into nine dominant recurring aesthetic expressions of ‘Interstitial art’. This concept explores the idea of ‘in-betweenness’ meaning thereby when a particular object falls into more than a single category. The curation takes a hint from Kawakubo’s work itself and has been arranged according to the contradictory contextual themes such as Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Anti- Fashion, Model/Multiple, High/Low, Then/Now, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/ Not Clothes.
‘Beauty in contradiction’ has been Rei’s signature for years and this exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to understand her work and interpret her creations as to their personal understanding.
