Dress

Design House Comme des Garçons Japanese
Designer Rei Kawakubo Japanese
fall/winter 2005–6
Not on view
Since founding Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo has consistently defined and redefined the aesthetics of our time. Season after season, collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body. Kawakubo's fashions impose an intense immediacy, emphasizing the present. She brings into doubt both the logic of temporal continuity and the presumptive rhythm of life - birth, marriage, death - as seen in the collection, "Broken Bride". This dress, the final look in the collection, features elements of Victorian bridal and mourning dress and subverts the historical silhouette through the opening at the center front.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Dress
  • Design House: Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969)
  • Designer: Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942)
  • Date: fall/winter 2005–6
  • Culture: Japanese
  • Medium: cotton, silk, polyester, rayon, metal
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Gould Family Foundation Gift, in memory of Jo Copeland, 2014
  • Object Number: 2014.631
  • Curatorial Department: The Costume Institute

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