Ensemble

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.