International in Style is pleased to recap the Comme des Garçons – Art of the In-Between exhibition, currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Since founding Comme des Garçons (“like some boys”) in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo (born 1942) has consistently defined and redefined the aesthetics of our time. Season after season, collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted charac – teristics of the fashionable body. Her fashions not only stand apart from the genealogy of clothing but also resist definition and confound interpretation. They can be read as Zen koans or riddles devised to baffle, bemuse, and bewilder. At the heart of her work are the koan mu (emptiness) and the related notion of ma (space), which coexist in the concept of the “in-between.” This reveals itself as an aesthetic sensibility that establishes an unsettling zone of visual ambiguity and elusiveness.
“Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” examines nine expressions of “in-betweenness” in Kawakubo’s collections: Absence/Presence; Design/Not Design; Fashion/ Antifashion; Model/Multiple; High/Low; Then/Now; Self/ Other; Object/Subject; and Clothes/Not Clothes. It reveals how her designs occupy the spaces between these dualities —which have come to be seen as natural rather than social or cultural — and how they resolve and dissolve binary logic. Defying easy classification themselves, her clothes expose the artificiality, arbitrariness, and “emptiness” of conventional dichotomies. Kawakubo’s art of the “in-between” generates meaningful medi – ations and connections as well as revolutionary innovations and transformations, offering endless possibilities for creation and re-creation.
See some of my favorite takeaways below:
between elite and popular culture—another
modernist preoccupation—through Kawakubo’s
collection Motorbike Ballerina. The ensembles
combine tutus and leather jackets in an attempt
to reconcile the “high” culture of ballet with the
“low” subculture of bikers or “greasers.” Kawakubo
described the collection as “Harley–Davidson
loves Margot Fonteyn,” a reference to the American
motorcycle manufacturer and the British
prima ballerina.
a frustration with the status quo: “Many times a
theme for a collection arises from a feeling of anger
or indignation at conditions in society. The origin
of an idea is found in not being satisfied with what
exists already.” At the same time, she has said,
“I have no desire to make my own designs into
messages addressing the issues of our world.”
When it comes to the zeitgeist, she tends to engage
with it symbolically and conceptually.
in 1973, her sole purpose was personal autonomy.
“Independence has always been of greatest
importance to me,” she has stated. Like the search
for “newness,” the pursuit of freedom—freedom
from convention and freedom of expression—is a
defining attribute of her fashions. This quest has
fueled her ongoing interest in street style, particularly
punk: “I’ve always liked the [punk] spirit in the
sense that it’s against the run of the mill, the normal
way of doing things. . . . Punk is against flattery.”
International In Style 