Cutting Room

Behind the scenes of Rei Kawakubo’s Met Fifth Avenue show, a voyage through her labyrinthine landscape in the making.

- Alexander Fury

This summer, the work of Rei Kawakubo, founder and creative director of Comme des Garçons, is the subject of an exhibition at the Costume Institute of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both Kawakubo and the curator in charge, Andrew Bolton, insist the show is not a retrospective – though that would certainly be Kawakubo’s due.

The last exhibition at The Met dedicated to a living fashion designer was in 1983, when Diana Vreeland, former editor-in-chief of US Vogue, staged a show exploring the work of Yves Saint Laurent, believed then and now to be one of the 20th century’s greatest. Two years earlier, in 1981, Kawakubo made her debut at Paris Fashion Week, presenting collections that radically reconsidered conventions of dressing, dressmaking and fashion as a whole. They were revered by few, reviled by many. Today, they seem uncannily prescient: a new way of looking at fashion, of embedding concepts, of cutting garments flat rather than tailoring them to the body. These clothes had a different form, a different look and a different intent.