Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons Art of the In-Between

The Costume Institute’s spring 2017 exhibition examined the work of 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 featured approximately 140 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her more recent collections, many with heads and wigs created and styled by Julien d’Ys. The galleries illustrated the designer’s revolutionary experiments in “in-betweenness”—the space between boundaries. Objects were 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.