KAWAKUBO AT THE MET

We just saw the Comme des Garcons show at the MET. I am surprised by my emotional response to the show and how inspiring it is.

This is a 20 year retrospective of Rei Kawakubo‘s groudbreaking fashion pieces. If you don’t know anything about her enormous influence on fashion (of which I was only very dimly aware, I will admit), she has continually pushed the boundary of what is wearable further out.

The focus of her work has been about form, abstraction, representation, function, art, culture, etc.  Sound familiar?  The show was titled Art of the In-Between.  Some of the titles of the sections of the show include Clothes/Not Clothes, Design/Not Design, Abstraction/Representation, etc.

In some of her investigations of in-betweeness, she is wrestling with abstraction and representation, two terms near and dear to our hearts.

“Things that have never been seen before have a tendency to be somewhat abstract, but making art is not my intention at all.  All my effort is oriented towards giving form to clothes that have never been seen before.”

And what might be her thoughts on the in-betweeeness the cultures of the West, and the East?

“From the beginning, I dispensed with any preconceived notions about Western and Eastern Social mores and cultures, as all these things are irrelevant to my works…I deliberately cast away all questions of upbringing. nationality, sociology and the like.”

Operating outside of culture.  Dispensation with what is Western and Eastern.  Meeting abstraction and representation head on.  Having the guts to state that your goal is to provide new forms.  All of this is almost head spinningly relevant to our investigations in these pages.  What she is concerned about is what we are concerned about.

Except function.

“Personally, I don’t care about function at all…When I hear ‘where could you wear that?’ or ‘it’s not very wearable,’ or ‘who would wear that?’ to me it’s just a sign that someone missed the point.”

Ok.  So we don’t go there.  At least not in these pages.  Here, we pride ourselves on our ability to draw between abstraction and representation, to draw forms that have not been seen before, to draw without making art, and to end up with design solutions that indeed function.

In various articles about her on the web, what comes thru is that she considers herself, first and last, a business person.  And I guess this is the icing on the cake.  With Kawakubo, we have an entity that looks very hard at the toughest questions.  And they get paid.

Very inspirational.

The photo below is from the Blood and Roses Spring/summer 2015 collection.  My drawing above is my attempt to rationalize and understand the form. 

1.  Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garcons, Art of the In-Between. exhibition guide, 4 May – 4 Sept 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York.