All Photos By Gail

Few designers collapse the boundaries between fashion and art as audaciously as Rei Kawakubo, the visionary force behind Comme des Garçons. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a landmark retrospective of her work, Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, spotlighting the designer’s relentless pursuit of ambiguity, contradiction, and reinvention. This week’s featured kimono-inspired ensemble, however, was photographed as part of the exhibit Kimono Style, featuring items from the collection of John C. Webber.

This kimono-like robe layered over a pinafore-style dress, emblazoned with the oversized face of an anime character on both the front and back, perfectly illustrates the designer’s ability to disrupt both tradition and expectation

The outfit hails from Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2018 collection, but it shares DNA with the themes central to The Met’s 2017 exhibition. The piece marries Eastern and Western influences, juxtaposing the classical silhouette of a kimono with the childlike playfulness of Japanese popular culture. By pairing a traditional garment form with the flattened, cartoonish visage of manga-style art, she stages a dialogue between heritage and modernity, high art and consumer culture.

The designer engages with the concept of kawaii (cute) and teenage culture by borrowing artist Makoto Takahashi’s shojo manga prints embodying a genre of Japanese comic book art aimed at teenage girls and recognizable by the figures’ starry-eyed expressions. The designer called her bold prints, a type of “multidimensional graffiti,” and accessorized them with plastic children’s toys and trinkets. The dramatic shape of the train evokes a kimonos backside, while also alluding to the volume of a French 18 century gown.

Back of Kimono Robe

Like much of her work, this design isn’t about wearability in any conventional sense — it’s about making a statement. The robe functions as a moving canvas, where fashion collides with graphic design, animation, and performance. Seen from a distance, the massive, staring face dominates the garment, transforming the wearer into a living, larger-than-life character. Up close, the layering of robe and pinafore destabilizes expectations of how garments should fit or function, a Kawakubo hallmark.

The result is equal parts whimsical and unsettling. By scaling up a cartoon face to monumental proportions, Kawakubo amplifies the visual language of anime—an art form often dismissed as juvenile —and places it on par with fine art. In doing so, she challenges assumptions not just about fashion, but about culture itself: what is worthy of reverence, and what is relegated to the margins.

Rei Kawakubo has always operated in this in-between space, resisting categorization, and this anime-inflected ensemble is no exception. It’s a garment that is also an image, a robe that is also a mask, a costume that is also a critique. In the world of Comme des Garçons, contradictions aren’t mistakes — they are the point.