Ensemble

Design House Comme des Garçons Japanese
Designer Rei Kawakubo Japanese
spring/summer 2015
Not on view
One of the most influential fashion designers today, Rei Kawakubo generally eschews historicism, traditionalism, and trends, instead working relentlessly to expand on her distinctive explorations of shape and construction—an achievement made all the more impressive by her tendency to work in monochrome. Her collections prioritize form over surface and have regularly featured so much black that when she flooded the runway with an equal proportion of red in 1988, she was compelled to title the collection “Red Is Black,” in a nod to the fashionable ubiquity of her palette. More recently, the designer reprised her use of red in a monochromatic collection titled “Blood and Roses.” This ensemble—an abstraction of shapes, materials, and surfaces that draws powerfully on the color’s emotional associations and potency—is unusual in its subtle allusion to the eighteenth-century panniered silhouette.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Ensemble
  • Design House: Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969)
  • Designer: Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942)
  • Date: spring/summer 2015
  • Culture: Japanese
  • Medium: (a) wool, nylon, polyester, cotton (b) plastic (polyurethane), polyester, cotton (c) polyester, cotton, (d, e) cotton, synthetic fiber, and (e, f) plastic (polyvinyl chloride)
  • Credit Line: Catharine Breyer Van Bomel Foundation Fund, 2015
  • Object Number: 2015.268a–g
  • Curatorial Department: The Costume Institute

More Artwork

Research Resources

The Met provides unparalleled resources for research and welcomes an international community of students and scholars. The Met's Open Access API is where creators and researchers can connect to the The Met collection. Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.

To request images under copyright and other restrictions, please use this Image Request form.

Feedback

We continue to research and examine historical and cultural context for objects in The Met collection. If you have comments or questions about this object record, please complete and submit this form. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments.