In New York: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As promised, here is a glimpse of some of the ensembles that will feature in the exhibition at The Met in New York City.

The show will examine Rei Kawakubo’s fascination with the space between boundaries. This in-between space is revealed throughout Kawakubo’s work as an aesthetic sensibility, establishing an unsettling zone of oscillating visual ambiguity that challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability.

This thematic exhibition will be The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.

In celebration of the opening, The Met’s Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday 1 May, 2017.  The evening’s co-chairs will be Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour.  Rei Kawakubo and Ambassador Caroline Kennedy will serve as Honorary Chairs for the occasion.

‘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.’ – Rei Kawakubo

The Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear designs for Comme des Garçons, dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection.

Objects will be presented in eight distinctive and recurring aesthetic expressions of extremes in Kawakubo’s work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes.

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 4–September 4, 2017. Location:  Floor 2, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, The Met Fifth Avenue

Get Social:

• The Met website
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• #MetKawakubo #CostumeInstitute #MetGala

Seen at top: Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942) for Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969); Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.