Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between at The Met

Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942) for Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969); Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition Dates:
May 4–September 4, 2017

Exhibition Location:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Floor 2

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute spring 2017 exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, on view from May 4 through September 4, will examine Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. This in-between space is revealed in Kawakubo’s work as an aesthetic sensibility, establishing an unsettling zone of oscillating visual ambiguity that challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. Not a traditional retrospective, this thematic exhibition will be The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.  

“In blurring the art/fashion divide, Kawakubo asks us to think differently about clothing,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Met.  “Curator Andrew Bolton will explore work that often looks like sculpture in an exhibition that will challenge our ideas about fashion’s role in contemporary culture.”

In celebration of the opening, The Met's Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday, May 1, 2017.  The evening’s co-chairs will be Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour.  Rei Kawakubo and Ambassador Caroline Kennedy will serve as Honorary Chairs.  The event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and capital improvements.  

“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute.  “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”

Rei Kawakubo said, “I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design...by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm.  And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion...imbalance... unfinished... elimination...and absence of intent.”

Exhibition Overview

The exhibition will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear designs for Comme des Garçons, dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection.  Objects will be organized into eight dominant and recurring aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo’s work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes.  Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.  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.  

Exhibition Credits

The exhibition will be curated by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, who will collaborate on the exhibition design with Rei Kawakubo. Lighting for the exhibition will be created by Thierry Dreyfus @ Eyesight Group.  Heads and wigs will be created and styled by Julien d’Ys.  The design for the 2017 Costume Institute Benefit will be created by Nathan Crowley with Raul Avila, who has produced the Benefit décor since 2007.

Special thanks to Apple, Condé Nast, Farfetch, H&M, Maison Valentino, and Warner Bros. for their support of the exhibition and benefit.

Related Content

A publication, authored by Andrew Bolton and designed by Fabien Baron, will accompany the exhibition. It will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.  

The exhibition and gala will be featured on the Museum’s website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via #MetKawakubo, #CostumeInstitute, and #MetGala.

Exhibition Overview on The Met's site