The Costume Institute is a curatorial department of The Met that houses some 35,000 fashionable dress, regional costumes and accessories from the fifteenth century to the present. Funded by the fashion industry and helmed by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the primary fund-raising event for the Institute takes place each May at the annual Met Gala to celebrate the opening of the spring exhibition.
This year's solo show, the first devoted to a living designer since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983, belongs to avant-garde fashion legend Rei Kawakubo. She is known for her bold defiance of beauty and fashion conventions, thanks to her spontaneous and experimental techniques and methods of construction.
The theme of the exhibition features 140 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for her company Comme des Garçons and centers around the nine conceptual dichotomies of absence/presence, design/not design, fashion/antifashion, model/multiple, high/low, then/now, self/other, object/subject and clothes/not clothes. Since Ms. Kawakubo says she does not trust words, I'll let my photos from the exhibition do the talking.
Note to reader: She does not expect everyone to like Comme des Garçons any more than she expects everyone to wear Comme des Garçons.
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