Dress
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. This ensemble from Kawakubo’s autumn/winter 1983 collection “Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Bag Coats” exemplifies the designer’s work after 1979, when she abandoned her previous references and decided to “start from zero,” or to create clothes that had never been seen before in fashion. The collection, among her first presented to Western audiences in Paris, featured a consistent black and grey palette, outsized silhouettes, asymmetrical tucks, and unconventional appendages. The designs elicited extreme reactions from critics owing to their repudiation of the fashionable ideals of the period.
Artwork Details
- Title: Dress
- Design House: Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969)
- Designer: Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942)
- Date: fall/winter 1983–84
- Culture: Japanese
- Medium: wool
- Credit Line: Purchase, Gould Family Foundation Gift, in memory of Jo Copeland, 2015
- Object Number: 2015.60
- Curatorial Department: The Costume Institute
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