Two global iconoclasts who are the most visionary and influential fashion designers in recent history and who changed the world of fashion forever are for the first time united in fashion history by bringing together an unparalleled stunning Westwood | Kawakubo blockbuster world-premiere exhibition of more than 140 groundbreaking pieces at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. mylifestylenews writes.
<Reinvention – Design Method>
As self-taught designers, both Westwood and Kawakubo began their careers without formal training, which has enabled an expansive freedom in their approach to making.
In the past, a collection could emerge from an abstract phrase, a photograph or something as unexpected as a crumpled piece of paper.
Today, it might emerge from an emotion or a moment of introspection.
Whatever the source, Kawakubo’s designs always resist the logic of fashion: they reject function, explode for and scale, and demand new methods of construction.
Colour is central, as is challenging the traditional hierarchies of materials – elevating those that might once have been dismissed as kitsch, cheap or overly feminine.
Westwood often sought inspiration from the past. In the 1980s and 90s, she conflated time periods – ancient Greece and Rome, Tudor England, eighteenth-century France – crafting narratives, characters, silhouettes and decorative techniques that celebrated and subverted tradition. Nothing was off limits.
In service of her longstanding critique of the establishment, Westwood parodied the cliches of Britishness – aristocratic and royal dress, twinsets and pearls, schoolboy stripes, hunting attire and tartan – producing collections that playfully mocked class and conformity.
<The Body>
Across their careers Westwood and Kawakubo have reimagined the relationship between fashion and the body.
In distinct, but equally radical ways both have questioned social constructs, challenged fashion industry standards, and explored the tension between freedom and constraint, comfort and objectification.
For Kawakubo, the body has long been a site of conceptual exploration.
Her Body Meets Dress-Dress Meets Body collection, presented in 1996, used irregular padding to distort the silhouette and blur the boundary between body and garment.
In 2012, she used two-dimensional pattern-cutting to create ‘flat” clothing that disregarded the contours of the body altogether.
Most recently, her collections have evolved into “wearable objects”: extreme, sculptural works that abandon comfort and function to critique socially constructed ideas of clothing forms and beauty.
Westwood has similarly contested precepts of sexual expression and the “fashionable body” but did so through irony and exaggeration.
Rejecting the minimalist “waif’ aesthetic of the early 1990s, she created hyper-feminine silhouettes through padding and compression, infusing her designs with a provocative sensibility.
By bringing historical undergarments such as the corset and bustle to the outside, Westwood both exposed and satirized the artifice of femininity, transforming it into a form of sexual agency.
<Ceremony of Separation>
For Kawakubo, her Ceremony of Separation collection, 2015, expressed “how the beauty and power of ceremony can alleviate the pain of separating, for the one departing as well as for the one saying goodbye".
The materials and palette – laces and white, black and gold – were chosen for their layered meanings and connotations in both Eastern and Western cultures.
Works made from large, knotted bundles emulate Japanese furoshiki bags, used to carry belongings or gifts, or for long pilgrimages.
The runway presentation was accompanied by a work by neo-classical British composer Max Richter. Sparing and minimal, the soundtrack echoed the collection’s melancholic tenor, as did the veil-like hairstyles created by Kawakubo’s longtime collaborator Julien d’Ys. The theme of separation was further underscored by the choreography, which saw models face off at the centre of the runway before turning in half circle and walking away.
<The Power of Clothes>
Over the course of their careers, Westwood and Kawakubo have each harnessed fashion as a tool for questioning convention and expressing their own values or political concerns.
For Westwood, this became especially pronounced from 2005 onwards, when her collections and runway presentation became inseparable from her activism. She campaigned fiercely for humanitarian and ecological causes, and her garments often featured painted and printed slogans and graphics, reviving the agitprop of her early punk years.
Kawakubo’s work is similarly charged with ideas of freedom and revolution. While she remains resistant to explaining the “meaning” of her collections, she has in recent years issued written statements intimating their themes.
These statements reveal many collections are creative expressions of her response to broader global issues and the state of humanity.
Together, Westwood’s and Kawakubo’s legacies are defined by creative courage, technical mastery and an unyielding belief in fashion as an agent for change.
Their designs continue to inform contemporary approaches to fashion and inspire the pursuit of artistic and ideological freedom.
It is easy to see why Westwood and Kawakubo’s designs continue to resonate. Their legacy is one of creativity, design originality and technical mastery. It is also the willingness to consider the relationship between oneself and fashion and the wider world, and to have the courage to stand by one’s beliefs. After them, fashion was never the same.
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.
“To make a form in which a woman looks pretty in the conventional way is not interesting to me at all.”
Kawakubo, 2004
“The right half of my brain likes tradition and history. The left wants to break the rules.”
Kawakubo, 2005
“I never intended to start a revolution. I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”
Kawakubo, 2005
“Creation is what takes us forward. Where there is nothing new, there is no progress.”
Kawakubo, 2009
“It is true to say that I “design” the company, not just clothes. Creation does not end with just the clothes. New interesting business ideas, revolutionary retail strategies, unexpected collaborations, nurturing of in-house talent – all are examples of Comme des Garçons’s creation.”
Kawakubo, 2009
“I’ve always felt an affinity with the punk spirit. I like that word. Every collection is that. Punk is against flattery, and that’s what I like about it.”
Kawakubo, 2013
“When fashion is driven by creation, I suppose it can be called an art form… As long as something is new and has never been seen before, I don’t mind if people call it art.” Kawakubo, 2015
“There are no mirrors in the <first Comme des Garçons> boutique to emphasize the notion that one should buy clothes because of how they make you feel, not how they make you look.”
Kawakubo, 2015
“Society needs something new, something with the power to provide stimulus and the drive to move us forward… Maybe fashion alone is not enough to change our world, but I consider it my mission to keep pushing and to continue to propose new ideas.” Kawakubo, 2016
“Freedom, rebellion and independence are my mottos.”
Kawakubo, 2024
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.
“Perhaps at this point in time, fashion may be the most interesting art form.”
Westwood, 1990
“It’s just a question of adjusting the eyes. It’s only perverse because it’s unexpected.”
Westwood, 1994
“I don’t like the idea of treating women as a sort of art object. The impact should be from the women herself. The clothes have to be real clothes.”
Westwood, 1994
“I still adore what remains of the British in clothes.”
Westwood, 1996
“I think the real link that connects all my clothes is this idea of heroic…clothes can give you a better life.” Westwood, 2004
“I would describe <fashion> really as a nostalgia for the future.”
Westwood, 2004
“We weren’t only rejecting the values of the older generation; we were rejecting their taboos as well.”
Westwood, 2004
“I don’t feel very comfortable defending my fashion except to say that people don’t have to buy it. You do have to consume. You have to live. Fashion is life-enhancing and I think it’s a lovely, generous thing to do for other people.”
Westwood, 2007
“I am especially happy at the moment because I feel that everything is coming together – that I can use fashion as a medium to express my ideas to fight for a better world; and because of the credibility fashion gives me a voice, and this in turn helps the fashion and keeps me stimulated and inspired.”
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