The Metropolitan Museum of Art, located in New York City, is indeed a big draw for locals and tourists alike. On the “First Monday in May” the Met Gala kicked off the opening of the 2017 Spring exhibit with a star-studded gala held at the Met Museum. The Costume Institute, which is housed in the museum, has chosen to showcase the work of Japanese fashion designer and artist Rei Kawakubo. This talented designer is well known for one-of-a-kind great designs and often challenges the predictable notions of good taste, beauty and fashion. Her fashion label, Comme des Garçons, is truly the convergence of art and fashion. She creates unique and avant-garde designs which instantly catch your eye and you are left wondering where she draws her inspiration from.
The exhibit features 140 designs that date from the early 1980s to her most recent collections. The Costume Institute has not done a monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983, so you can expect this one to be a huge success and draw large crowds and long lines.
When Anna Wintour, artistic director for Condé Nast, was asked about the designer at the Met Gala she replied “Rei not only thinks outside the box, she discards the box all together”.
Rei Kawakubo fuses art and fashion together to produce something extraordinary. She makes us think differently about clothing. When you first see her collection, it literally looks like a sculpture in an exhibition and it certainly challenges our ideas about the role of fashion in contemporary culture.
Rei is definitely one of the most powerful and inspiring designers of the past 40 years and she invites us to rethink fashion as something that requires continuous creation, recreation and hybridity. The objects are organized into nine different aesthetic expressions of relation in the designers work: Design/Not Design, Object/Subject, Absence/Presence, High/Low, Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Clothes/Not Clothes, Model/Multiple, Self/Other and Then/Now. She takes down the imaginary walls between these contrasts and exposes their uncertainty and artificiality. Get ready because this is unlike any other exhibit at the Costume Institute.
The Comme des Garçons by Rei Kawakubo exhibit runs from now through September 4, 2017. Tickets can be purchased at the museum or online at the Met Museum in advance of your visit.
Photos courtesy of the Met Museum
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