Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has announced that its spring exhibition will be the overview of the work of none other than Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons.

“Presented in the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall on the second floor, the exhibition will examine Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. Existing within and between entities—self/other, object/subject, fashion/anti-fashion—Kawakubo’s work challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and, ultimately, fashionability. Not a traditional retrospective, the thematic exhibition will be The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983,” stated the Met’s press release.

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.”

The exhibition will consist of 120 women’s ensembles that Kawakubo has designed since her first Paris show in 1981. It will be on view from May 4th to September 4th, 2017 – an ambitious run of four months – and will be accompanied by a catalog. Needless to say we are looking forwarded to this!

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/rei-kawakubo / Images courtesy of the Met Museum