'REI KAWAKUBO / COMME DES GARCONS: ART OF THE IN-BETWEEN'

摘要

The fashion designer Rei Kawakubo is often described as nonconformist, avant-garde and eccentric. Her creations for Comme des Garcons, the label she founded in 1969, elicit the same descriptions, but that has not hindered sales in her retail empire, which reports $280 million in annual revenue.1 Kawakubo is exceptionally reserved when it comes to interpreting her work publicly. It was rather surprising, then, that she would allow herself to become the subject of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. In a heretofore rare interview, Kawakubo described the event: 'It's a Met show for Comme des Garcons, not a Comme des Garcons show at the Met'.2 With one small preposition, she cleverly confirmed the inevitable commercial reality of mounting an exhibition on a living designer. Although Yves Saint Laurent was the first to earn a monographic exhibition at the Met in 1983 - a fact the museum, and the press in turn, regularly promote - the context of this type of exhibition has evolved in the decades since. Collaborations between high fashion designers and mass-market retailers have become commonplace in recent years and these partnerships are now recognisable to consumers through a title structure that explains their association, centred around the word 'for'. How different is the relationship between Comme des Garcons for H&M and Comme des Garcons for the Met? It begs the question of who leads the narrative and establishes goals. With 'Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between', curator Andrew Bolton set out to definitively place Kawakubo's designs within the realm of contemporary art and upend expectations of traditional fashion exhibitions, with regard to space and curatorial objective, as will be explored further. Its title alludes not only to the place where Kawakubo resides in fashion, but also to the harmony of vision between an actively producing designer and a curator in a leading art institution. The challenges of such a working relationship became clear after touring the exhibition.