All Photos By Gail
Every year , the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts a fashion exhibit full of mind-blowing, ‘wearable’ works of art. We enjoy making multiple visits during each exhibit’s tenure, which generally lasts into late summer, and taking way too many photos than we will never do anything with. Because too may photos is a thing. and it is how we roll.
For spring/summer 2017, the Costume Institute’s exhibition examines the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons (French for “Like Boys”), who is 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. 90% of the designs are just out of control, crazy couture that no one would ever wear anywhere but the runway, or one time only to a gala where you need to be remembered for wearing a dress that comes with its own cage, or something.
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, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.
If you are intrigued by the Pink Presses in this post, which is how I was able to distill the exhibit for this blog, then you need to check this shit out in person, because it is just insane.
18th Century Punk, Autumn/Winter 2016 – 2017
Look: Proof that this ‘dress’ fits on a human body!
Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons Art of The In-Between Runs Through September 4th, 2017 at The Met, NYC.