Ensemble

Rei Kawakubo|Comme des Garçons

spring/summer 1984 · cotton · Costume Institute

Since founding Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo 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 characteristics of the fashionable body. This ensemble from Kawakubo’s spring/summer 1984 collection “Round Rubber” exemplifies the designer’s work after 1979, when she abandoned her previous references and decided to “start from zero,” or to create clothes that had never been seen before in fashion. The collection, among her first presented to Western audiences in Paris, featured a consistent black palette, outsized silhouettes, asymmetry, and unconventional elasticized openings. The designs elicited extreme reactions from critics owing to their repudiation of the fashionable ideals of the period.

Artist

Rei Kawakubo|Comme des Garçons

Date

spring/summer 1984

Medium

cotton

Culture

Japanese

Department

Costume Institute

Credit line

Gift of Patricia Volk, 2013