Full Description
Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is undoubtedly one of the world's major fashion designers. In 2017 she was the second living designer ever to be given a retrospective at the renowned Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work has exerted an extraordinary influence over succeeding generations of designers and is a major point of reference for all those wishing to explore the place of fashion in contemporary culture.
The 14 essays in this collection, written by eminent fashion theorists from around the world, explore the relationship of Kawakubo's work to art, philosophy and architecture, and reveal how Kawakubo's creative output allows us to understand the very notion of fashion itself.
Contents
List of Illustrations
1. Rex Butler (editor) 'Introduction: For and against Fashion'
2. Akiko Fukai 'Couture Clash' (excerpt)
3. Barbara Vinken 'The Empire Designs Back' (excerpt)
4. Karinna Nobbs and Kat Duffy 'Rei Kawakubo as Retail Format Pioneer'
5. Llewellyn Negrin 'Rei Kawakubo: Agent Provocateur in a Hyper-Glamourised World'
6. Yuniya Kawamura 'Rei Kawakubo: Defiance Personified'
7. Masafumi Monden 'The Subversively Cute Side of Comme des Garçons: Rei Kawakubo and Romantic Transgression'
8. Tets Kimura 'Exploring the Theoretical Meaning of Rei Kawakubo: Two Waves of Arrivals of Japanese Fashion in the West and Georg Simmel's Fashion Dualism'
9. Karen de Perthuis 'Performing the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo's Fashion Manifesto'
10. Ory Bartal 'Rei Kawakubo and the Luxury of Freedom'
11. Bronwyn Clark-Coolee 'The Complexity of Kawakubo: A Radical Form of Consciousness'
12. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas 'Between Clothing and Flesh: Kawakubo at the Met'
13. Alison Gill 'From Amidst the Betwixt and Between: The Gap between the Not-Worn and the Worn that is Opened Up by the Photographic Images in Rei Kawakubo's Exhibition Catalogue'
14. Rex Butler 'Rei Kawakubo: Fashion Degree Zero'
Bibliography
Index
