Plan Ahead

Visiting Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty or Van Gogh’s Cypresses?

Read the additional visitor guidelines

MetPublications

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between

Bolton, Andrew (2017)

This title is in print.

AAM Publications Design Competition, Honorable Mention, Exhibition Catalogues (2018); BIGNY Book Show, Winner (2018); AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers, Winner (2017); Foreword Reviews' Book of the Year Award, Honorable Mention in Popular Culture (2017)

Publication Details

Description
Table of contents
About the authors
Press reviews
Tags

Related Titles

Related Content

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (3)
Exhibition
Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between
May 4–September 4, 2017

The Costume Institute's spring 2017 exhibition will examine the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. The thematic show will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection.

The galleries will illustrate the designer's revolutionary experiments in "in-betweenness"—the space between boundaries. Objects will be organized into eight aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo's work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.