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

A revelatory look at the influential and enigmatic designer behind Comme des Garçons

The great pantheon of fashion designers produces only a handful of creators who are masters of their métier. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is one of them. Widely recognized among her contemporaries as the most important and influential designer of the past forty years, she has, since her Paris debut in 1981, defined and transformed the aesthetics of our time. This lavishly illustrated publication examines Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. Existing within and between dualities — whether self/other, object/subject, art/fashion — Kawakubo’s work challenges the rigid divisions that have come to define received notions of identity and fashionability, inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, re-creation, and, ultimately, hybridity. Featuring brilliant new photography, and thought-provoking texts by Andrew Bolton, this book expresses the conceptual and challenging aesthetic of this visionary designer. An insightful interview and illustrated chronology of Kawakubo’s career provide additional context.

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Photography by Nicholas Alan Cope, Inez & Vinoodh, Katerina Jebb, Kazumi Kurigami, Ari Marcopoulos, Craig McDean, Brigitte Niedermair, Paolo Roversi, and Collier Schorr

This catalogue accompanies The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition.

''What I've only ever been interested in are clothes that one has never seen before, that are completely new, and how in what way they can be expressed. Is that called fashion? I don't know the answer.'' —Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is widely recognized as among the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years. Since her Paris debut in 1981, she has blurred the divide between art and fashion and transformed customary notions of beauty, identity, and the body.

This lavishly illustrated publication weaves an illuminating narrative around Kawakubo's experiments in oppositions and the spaces between boundaries. Brilliant new photographs of more than 120 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for Comme des Garçons accompanied by Kawakubo's commentary on her designs and process, reveal her conceptual and challenging aesthetic as never before. A chronology of Kawakubo’s career provides additional context, and an insightful conversation with the author offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this fashion visionary.

Also includes a bonus foldout poster featuring 2 Dimensions, autumn/winter 2012–13 and Invisible Clothes, spring/summer 2017. Photograph © Paolo Roversi, 2017.

About the Author:

Andrew Bolton is the Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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