THE COMME DES GARCONS EXHIBIT AT THE MET

In the making for over a year, the Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the location of The Costume Institute’s show, is dedicated to four decades of the legendary and trailblazing designer. It kicks off on May 4 and runs through Sept. 4 2017. Curated by Andrew Bolton, The Costume Institute’s curator, the showcase highlights 140 of Kawakubo’s designs for Comme des Garçons from the early Eighties to her fall 2017 “The Future of Silhouette” collection, complete with Kawakubo quotes and descriptions. The most outstanding looks include a crop of colorful dresses, in densely ruffled and tiered florals and pastels, cascades of blood red strips with rose applications, the signature “Holes” sweaters and a flurry of lumpy, contorted dresses. Regardless of the shape or form, each one is a testament of Kawakubo’s influential legacy and avant-garde sensibility. For sure, in her ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability, she pioneered the use of black, bias cuts, asymmetry and raw finishes. The galleries reveal the designer's revolutionary experiments in "in-betweenness,” or the space between boundaries. Objects are organized into nine aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo's work: Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes.