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

Gallery views of The Costume Institute's spring 2017 exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, curated by Andrew Bolton.

The Costume Institute's spring 2017 exhibition examines the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, 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.

In 1979 Kawakubo became "dissatisfied" with her collections, which, to that point, had been infused with Japanese folkloric influences. As she explained: "I felt I should be doing something more directional, more powerful . . . I decided to start from zero, from nothing, to do things that had not been done before, things with a strong image." This rupture, the first of two in her career, established Kawakubo as the archetypal modernist designer, whose pursuit of originality (or what she calls "newness") became the defining characteristic of every subsequent collection.

Fashion/Antifashion focuses on Kawakubo's early 1980s collections, which elicited extreme reactions from critics when they were shown in Paris, owing to their repudiation of many prevailing canons of Western fashion. In terms of Kawakubo's aesthetic of "in-betweenness," these works are significant for introducing the concepts of mu (emptiness), expressed through the monochromatic—principally black—color palette, and ma (space), embodied in the outsize, shapeless, loose-fitting garments that create excess space between skin and fabric, body and clothing.