FASHION

A VISION THAT NEVER STOPS

Rei Kawakubo at MOMA

By Rain Hu

She presents it how she wants it

Rei Kawakubo is the creative founder of Comme des Garçons. She never trained to be a fashion designer, but studied art and literature at Keio University. Perhaps as a result of this, Kawakubo has always followed her own path commercially and creatively. And that includes her insistence that she is just a clothes-maker and not an artist. However, a solo exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to be a repudiation of that stance and a kind of definitive artistic manifesto on Kawakubo’s part.

The exhibition is dedicated to her nearly half-century career. From the beginning the curators at the MOMA knew Kawakubo would challenge the conventional ways they normally present work. It’s fascinating that one of the first things she wanted to do was transform the museum venue itself. You could ask, what does that have to do with her clothes, but you would be missing the point if your answer is nothing. For Kawkubo, context is everything.

This dress needs space

To do this Kawakubo built a model in Japan of the New York Pavilion so that she could see how her clothes might interact in the space. She certainly wasn’t listening or paying attention to the museum’s internal exhibition design team. The entire exhibition hall was painted white, and filled with three-dimensional abstract sculptures to create a maze-like effect. She then scattered more than one hundred and fifty pieces throughout the space organized by collection—each collection, of course, had a theme and these themes in some sense define how we see the whole of her work. As Kawakubo said before: "Space is very important for my clothes.”

In addition to the exhibition space, Kawakubo was changing and refining the content up to and extending past the present moment. Her autumn/winter 2017 collection, which was just presented at the Paris Fashion Week in March, would be part of the show, even before the clothes made it to the shelves of the stores for people to buy. This is an example of Kawakubo’s crazy commitment to always being in the moment. If most museum shows are a celebration of an artist’s past work, this would be a demonstration of an artist who believes only in the present moment—that’s quite a philosophy.

What Kawakubo originally wanted for the show was the Comme des Garçons collections from Spring/Summer 2014 to the Fall/Winter 2017. The reason for that is since the spring/summer 2014 collection, Kawakubo was radically rethinking the Comme des Garcons approach. Kawakubo spoke in an interview that she feels the need to constantly subvert herself in order to be truly original. However, her previous work and success has increasingly become an obstacle to her creativity. Starting with the Spring/Summer 2014 collection, she began to push the limits of clothing design, taking on an aesthetic that was more abstract and exaggerated, and, perhaps, barely clothing at all.

Is this clothing or life?

In the Fall/Winter 2017 collection, the clothing has become something similar to pottery: the body is completely covered but accentuated. This is in contrast to the Fall/Winter 2012 collection, which was deliberately flat and two-dimensional, incorporating the popular ghostly bridal style of the Victorian era and the hole-in-the-sweater approach of the last century. And it might be a return to the interests behind her famous "Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body" collection in the Spring/Summer 1997, which transformed the human form by adding a padded cotton pad between the nylon garment and the human body. Part of its power was the it forced people to face up to the more unconventional things a body can do—like grow a tumor or become pregnant.

What’s fascinating is that the exhibit did not provide any explanatory text. All the clothes were displayed in an open space, leaving the audience free to come to their own conclusions about the work. Are these clothes fashion or anti-fashion? Are they high art or low? Are they Beautiful or ugly? There are no answers in the exhibition and that makes sense given Kawakubo’s history.

There will be no answers here

She only founded her own clothing line in the 1960’s, because she was unable to find a satisfactory designer for her work as a stylist. She rarely gives interviews and seems at pains not to explain her work. Many critics and scholars have various theories about her design philosophy. For example, many people generally think that Kawakubo's design reflects the idea of "wabi-sabi" in Japanese culture, deliberately not pursuing perfection and learning to appreciate the beauty of defects.

Harold Koda, former dean of the School of Fashion, once pointed out that Kawakubo's designs are based on the aesthetic preferences of the Japanese poor; Caroline Evans claimed that Kawakubo’s rise in the 1980s was a reaction against the anti-luxury-oriented fashion of the West. Francesca Granta sees Kawakubo's designs in relation to the Russian literary critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's doctrine of the "grotesque body". Kawkubo’s husband, Adrian Joffe, the CEO of Comme des Garçons, thinks that if one day her aesthetic becomes widely accepted, it would mean the end of the brand and her work.

The defects are what we should love

In this way, Kawakubo's design is challenging from the beginning to the end. Whether it is her desire to create something truly new, or just the need to create something satisfying, she never really provides an answer. Her work just is and that’s why the MOMA show was so powerful. It merely presented her work, rather than try to explain or fit it into some preconceived notion of art or design history.

Comme des Garçons is a mode of thinking, unconstrained, active, and endlessly self-renewable. It is like thinking itself; the only difference is that you can wear it.

©Rain and the CCA Arts Review