#MetKawakubo #CostumeInstitute #MetMuseum #MetGala Take a Trip to Paris: The Met at Pavillon Vendôme in Paris, France Our Coverage Sponsored by Hallak Cleaners the Couture Cleaner
Andrew Bolton and Rei Kawakubo at The Met's Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between advance press event.
Carrie Rebora Barratt, Rei Kawakubo, Andrew Bolton, and Anna Wintour at The Met's Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between advance press event.
Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons objects on display at The Met's Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between advance press event.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a press presentation on Monday, March 6, at Pavillon Vendôme in Paris, France to reveal early details about The Costume Institute's upcoming exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, opening on May 4. Rei Kawakubo and Anna Wintour joined Museum Deputy Director Carrie Rebora Barratt and Costume Institute Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton for a glimpse of some of the ensembles to be featured in the exhibition, on view May 4-September 4, 2017, at The Met in New York City.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute spring 2017 exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, on view from May 4 through September 4, will examine Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. This in-between space is revealed in Kawakubo’s work as an aesthetic sensibility, establishing an unsettling zone of oscillating visual ambiguity that challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. Not a traditional retrospective, this thematic exhibition will be The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.
“In blurring the art/fashion divide, Kawakubo asks us to think differently about clothing,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Met. “Curator Andrew Bolton will explore work that often looks like sculpture in an exhibition that will challenge our ideas about fashion’s role in contemporary culture.”
In celebration of the opening, The Met's Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday, May 1, 2017. The evening’s co-chairs will be Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour. Rei Kawakubo and Ambassador Caroline Kennedy will serve as Honorary Chairs. The event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and capital improvements.
“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”
Rei Kawakubo said, “I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design...by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm. And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion...imbalance... unfinished... elimination...and absence of intent.”
Exhibition Overview
The exhibition will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear designs for Comme des Garçons, dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection. Objects will be organized into eight dominant and recurring 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. Her fashions demonstrate that interstices are places of meaningful connection and coexistence as well as revolutionary innovation and transformation, providing Kawakubo with endless possibilities to rethink the female body and feminine identity.
Exhibition Credits
The exhibition will be curated by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, who will collaborate on the exhibition design with Rei Kawakubo. Lighting for the exhibition will be created by Thierry Dreyfus @ Eyesight Group. The design for the 2017 Costume Institute Benefit will be created by Nathan Crowley with Raul Avila, who has produced the Benefit décor since 2007.
Special thanks to Apple, Condé Nast, Farfetch, H&M, Maison Valentino, and Warner Bros. for their support of the exhibition and benefit.
Related Content
A publication, authored by Andrew Bolton and designed by Fabien Baron, will accompany the exhibition. It will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
The exhibition and gala will be featured on the Museum’s website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via #MetKawakubo, #CostumeInstitute, and #MetGala.
Photos Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA.com
