A Preview Of "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute In New York

The Costume Institute's spring 2017 exhibition will examine the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. The thematic show will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection. The galleries will illustrate the designer's revolutionary experiments in "in-betweenness"—the space between boundaries. Objects will be organized into eight aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo's work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness. On view from May 4 to September 4, 2017 at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper