Undeniably inventive, British designer Vivienne Westwood remade modern fashion with roots in punk, politics, parody and history while Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has redefined every convention of dress and explored the rule-breaking and imaginative approach used to create something new.
With the commitment to innovation and creative excellence celebrating those who dares to defy convention and shape the future, this summer, fashion will never be the same again.
Both Westwood and Kawakubo’s uncompromising creativity and disruption of fashion’s boundaries and their lasting impact of culture represents voices from the frontlines of fashion and culture that reflect on the legacy and enduring influence, celebrating divergence and convergence as well as in a dialogue to give new insights into their creativity and legacy.
The extraordinary exhibition also includes an exciting collaboration with Stephen Jones OBE displaying headpieces to complete the presentation.
The exhibition examines the creative parallels and contrasts between these two self-taught visionaries. Featuring significant loans from international museums and private collections, Westwood | Kawakubo offers an unprecedented exploration of the designers shared spirit of rebellion and radical reinvention.
Born a year apart on opposite sides of the globe, they both consistently challenged the “rules” of dress and have built powerful bodies of work anchored in the desire for autonomy and radical aesthetic change. They both rebelled against rigid sociocultural expectations to find economic and artistic freedom through fashion.
Equally strong-minded, innovative and unorthodox, their work similarly protests limiting concepts of dress and beauty. And while neither of them called themselves a feminist, each has used fashion to break down gender conventions.
From their earliest collections, Westwood and Kawakubo positioned themselves as provocateurs – designers who challenged the hierarchies of fashion and the politics of beauty and taste. The strength of Kawakubo and Westwood’s work lies in the power of their convictions and spirited defiance of the status quo.
Their design philosophies celebrate artistic freedom and self-expression and reject conventional notions of beauty and what is fashionable. Westwood once argued that clothing should "express individuality" and Kawakubo that it should, “allow a person…to be what they are.”
Looking at each designer’s formative work from the late 1970s and early 1980s, certain touchstones become evident, Westwood’s compulsion for provocation in one, the centrality of punk another, while for Kawakubo, it is a search for that which is new and unprecedented.
Westwood is often, and simplistically, cited as the creator of punk fashion, along with her then-partner Malcolm McLaren. An international counter-cultural movement, punk emerged in New York and London in the mid-1970s, brought the visual language of punk into fashion. Rips, tartan, bondage-wear and confrontational graphics transformed clothing into protest – emblems of anarchic, anti-authoritarian style.
Rooted in anti-authoritarian ideology, it was famously anarchic in both attitude and style. With an emphasis on crude DIY aesthetics, antagonistic posturing and individuality, the movement championed a rejection of the dominant political and social structures.Between 1974 and 1980, Westwood and McLaren’s boutique on King’s Road (SEX, then Seditionaries), became the epicentre of London’s punk scene. Together, the duo visualized and commercialized punk’s aesthetic. The pair’s infamous muslin Anarchy, Destroy and Tits straitjacket shirts, bondage trousers and hangman sweaters, worn by all genders, became emblems of punk after they were worn onstage by members of the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Westwood and McLaren’s clothing was designed to provoke. In 1975, they printed a T-shirt featuring two cowboys, naked from the waist down. A shop assistant who wore the design was arrested and fined for indecency while Westwood and McLaren were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. In response, they produced more T-shirts emblazoned with hardcore and politically subversive imagery.
Importantly for Westwood, Punk was a means to confront traditional gender roles and beauty ideals. Westwood’s muse was Jordan (Pamela Rooke), who worked at SEX. With bleached white hair and dark kohl eyes, Jordan became an icon of punk style.
Both Westwood and Jordan dressed in perverse and sadomasochistic garments made from rubber and leather that drew heavily from queer subcultures. Their clothing was intimidating and demonstrated to Westwood how fashion could be used to claim agency and power.
A decade later, Kawakubo declared she would “start from zero” and “do things not done before”. Like Westwood, she created without compromise, introducing asymmetry, enveloping volumes and the use of black and distressed fabrics into Western fashion vernacular.
Contemporary and conceptual works by Kawakubo show how she continues to channel punk’s spirit rebellion – not simply its visual language, but also its ethos of transgression and defiance.
She overwrote the language of punk in line with Japanese aesthetic principles such as wabi-sabi (simplicity and imperfection), as well as the concepts of mu (emptiness) and ma (space) and the use of black. Her designs proposed a complete rejection of existing fashion hierarchies.For her 18th-Century Punk collection (AW2016/17), Kawakubo presented quasi-frock coats in rich floral jacquards and oversized and articulated ensembles in bubble-gum-pink PVC that were “stitched” together with rivets reminiscent of samurai armour.
For the collection, Kawakubo worked with fabric makers in Italy, France and Switzerland to create specialist fabrics that referenced the era’s passion for embroidery, as well as the popularity of pink itself.
Her explanation was, “I suppose there was punk spirit in every age…I was thinking there had to be women in the eighteenth century who wanted to live strongly.”
<Rupture>
In 1981, Kawakubo presented her first international runway in Paris with a collection now known as Pirates.
That same year, Westwood made her runway debut in London at the Olympia, with her similarly tittled Pirate collection. These collections marked distinct creative ruptures; each representing a new design manifesto that would define their work for decades to come.
For Westwood, Pirate marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with historical cutting techniques, innovative fabric treatments and the destabilization of gendered dress.
Across her 1981-85 collections, she fused references from antiquity, historical and global dress, streetwear, art and queer culture, creating an eclectic and intellectually curious fashion vocabulary.
For Kawakubo, Pirates – and the groundbreaking collections that followed – embodied her modernist spirit and commitment to the new and original, realized through experimental pattern making, the creation of clothing forms and gender codes.
Yet it is Kawakubo’s refusal to look backwards, and her conceptual resolve to “break the idea of clothes”, that defines her work in the twenty-first century. From 2014 onwards, her collections – made solely for the runway or to order – illuminated her singular design language. Exaggerated and sculptural forms, freed from the body, represent the purest expression of her pursuit of the new and ongoing recalibration of fashion.
“I realized after Pirate that I didn’t have to qualify my ideas. I could do anything I liked; it was only a question of how I did that would make it original. I realized then that I could go on forever”. – Vivienne Westwood
<Reinvention – History>
A study of Westwood’s and Kawakubo’s work reveals a tension between tradition and transgression. Both demonstrate a deep understanding of the fundamentals of fashion – tailoring, dressmaking and textiles – even as they resist and rewrite these orthodoxies.
Westwood’s work often looked to art and fashion history for inspiration, Through study of museum archives and historical pattern books, her 1990s collections reinterpreted the opulence of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reclaiming the corset and crinoline as symbols of sexual liberty.
Kawakubo rarely quotes the past so directly. Her references, if present, are always abstracted. In 18th-Century Punk, she borrows silhouettes and fabrics from the period only to recalibrate them, denying familiarity and embracing transformation.
<Reinvention – Tailoring>
Both Westwood and Kawakubo share an interest in Western tailoring traditions and menswear.
Throughout their careers, they have interrogated the cultural tropes of tailoring, sexual politics and gender codes through innovate pattern-cutting and unorthodox material choices.
In the late 1980s, Westwood revived English wool, tweeds and Scottish tartans, embracing tailoring techniques associated with mid-century French couture and the bespoke suiting of Savile Row.
Her precisely cinched and close-fitting cuts celebrated and exaggerated the body’s curves to empower rather that constrain the “feminine” form.
Kawakubo has long examined what she calls “the basics of clothing” found in menswear: trousers, shirts, shorts and blazers. Through deconstruction and fusion, the rejection of function or repositioning of pattern pieces, she subverts every aspect of the tailoring process.
Her work often juxtaposes utility with typically “feminine” ornaments to further destabilise gender binaries and expectations of fit and form.
Rei Kawakubo
Born in Tokyo in 1942, Rei Kawakubo graduated from Keio University in 1964 with a degree in fine art and aesthetics. After working as a stylist, she began designing her own clothes and, in 1969, founded the label Comme des Garçons. In 1981, Kawakubo made her Paris debut – the first in a series of presentations that would establish her as one of the most radical and uncompromising voices in fashion.
From the outset, Kawakubo was determined to make clothes that, in her words, “did not exist before”. Her designs have subverted the norms of garment shape and function, reframed ideas of beauty, and proposed a new relationship between body and dress. Throughout the 1980s, her use of black, distressed fabrics and asymmetrical forms introduced a new visual and conceptual vocabulary to fashion. Her 1996 collection Body Meets Dress-Dress Meets Body collapsed the boundary between body and garment, radically distorting the silhouette.
Kawakubo’s reticence to give too much away when speaking about her collections has meant that her outlook can appear deeply personal rather than global, even as her fashion argues for freedom and revolution. Yet, a subtle shift in her perspective can perhaps be detected in recent collections which have carried more explicit themes.
Today, Kawakubo continues to test the limits of fashion through pioneering concepts and innovative design methods. Her recent runway collections are defined enveloping and abstract "objects for the body" that question what clothing can be. In its powerful originality, Kawakubo’s work defines convention, reframing how we see and think about fashion, beauty, agency and identity.
“I don’t like to show myself or my name. You have to know me through my clothes.”Kawakubo,1982
“<My clothes> are for the woman who is independent, who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.”
Kawakubo, 1983
“I’m not making something to fit any particular body. I’m thinking of something else – shapes. My sketches are lines. It’s fabric to be wrapped around the body and that is individual.”
Kawakubo, 1983
“What I think was more important was that I started doing what I wanted and on my own.”
Kawakubo, 2004
Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Derbyshire in 1941. Moving to London as a teenager, she briefly attended Harrow Art School before training as a teacher and working in a primary school. In the 1970s, after meeting Malcolm McLaren, the pair became creative collaborators and opened a series of boutiques on the King’s Road in Chelsea – spaces that became a youth fashion mecca with a radical influence on international fashion. The pair later shifted from street fashion to the industry’s heartland, presenting collections at London and Paris fashion weeks.
From 1984, Westwood began designing independently, presenting her first solo collection in 1985 and ushering in a new era that fused punk’s anti-fashion spirit with the craftsmanship of haute couture. From this period onwards, her work reimagined Savile Row bespoke tailoring and British Textiles, using parody and provocation to challenge accepted ideas of taste and gender.
Westwood revived the corset, crinoline and bustle, transforming symbols of restriction into emblems of subversion. Her rebellious and provocative designs revealed not a rejection but a deep engagement with history, drawing inspiration from art and fashion archives, including those of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection. In later decades, Westwood channelled her creative platform into activism, passionately campaigning for environment and social causes, generating a lasting anti-authoritarian impact on and off the runway.
“The only reason I’m in fashion is to destroy the word “conformity”. Nothing’s interesting to me unless it’s got that element.” Westwood, 1981
“My job is always to confront the Establishment to try and find out where freedom lies and what you can do.”
Westwood, 1981
“I utilized the conventional to make something unorthodox.”
Westwood, 1987
“I use fashion as an excuse to talk about other things in broader cultural terms, because that is where my interests lie.”
Westwood 1993
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