Two era-defining avant garde trend designers, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, will likely be introduced collectively in a blockbuster summer season exhibition introduced on Tuesday by the Nationwide Gallery of Victoria.
It has been greater than 20 years since Westwood’s work has been exhibited extensively in Australia, and the NGV present would be the first because the designer’s loss of life in December 2023.
Curated by the NGV, with works drawn from the museum’s intensive trend assortment supplemented by loans from the Metropolitan Museum, the V&A and others, Westwood | Kawakubo will open in Melbourne on 7 December.
Westwood got here to prominence because the designer behind the tattered, torn and infrequently obscene clothes of London’s Seventies punk scene, earlier than shifting in the direction of irreverent however traditionally grounded tailoring and corsetry within the early Nineteen Eighties. Later her local weather activism grew to become a essential part of her life and work.
After establishing Comme des Garçons in her native Japan, Kawakubo appalled the style institution when she started displaying in Paris in 1981. Her deconstructed and distressed designs gained her a fervent underground fanbase and, with the hindsight of historical past, they’ve gained essential approval too. In 2017 Kawakubo was the topic of a uncommon standalone exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum; it was solely the second time the Costume Institute had run an exhibition of a residing designer, the primary being Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.
after publication promotion
Katie Somerville, the NGV’s senior curator of trend and textiles and the exhibition’s co-curator, says whereas Westwood and Kawakubo’s works are aesthetically distinct, there may be “a beautiful symmetry” within the designers’ lives and practices. Each designers had been self-taught and so they had been born a 12 months aside. Additionally they constructed companies in an trade that was, and stays, male-dominated in its higher echelons.
When planning the exhibition, Somerville researched whether or not the pairing had ever been made earlier than, “and nobody had”, she says. “In order that’s at all times a extremely thrilling area to be in … when you possibly can current an exhibition idea that does break new floor.”
Quite than a chronological retrospective, the exhibition will likely be curated thematically, with rooms dedicated to punk, the designers’ engagement with the physique and their historic influences.
Greater than 140 works will likely be on show, together with early-career punk ensembles by Westwood, alongside a tartan robe worn by Kate Moss within the designer’s 1993-94 Anglomania assortment. From Comme des Garçons there will likely be a customized gown worn by Rihanna to the 2017 Met Gala and 40 clothes donated by Kawakubo for the exhibition.
The NGV has grow to be identified for its double-bill blockbusters, together with Warhol | Ai Weiwei and Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines. Westwood | Kawakubo would be the first trend pairing and the primary to characteristic feminine artists. “I feel while you deliver two particular person artists collectively … [there are] fantastic new methods of seeing their work that come out of that comparability,” Somerville says.
“We’re not for a minute saying that they’re the identical or comparable, however there’s sufficient there that connects them to make that type of forwards and backwards of their work collectively … actually thrilling and productive.”
