NGV summer blockbuster will celebrate two trailblazing fashion designers

The exhibition finds commonalities – and new perspectives – in the works of boundary pushing fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo.

Punk and Provocation: Westwood | Kawakubo co-curator Katie Somerville at the National Gallery of Victoria. Picture: Eugene Hyland

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The National Gallery of Victoria has announced its next summer blockbuster will examine the life and works of two iconoclastic fashion designers, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons.

Westwood | Kawakubo will feature more than 140 pieces – many drawn from the NGV’s collections as well as loans from The Met Museum in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Palais Galliera in Paris and private loans.

Rei Kawakubo has also donated more than 40 Comme des Garcons works to the NGV.

The exhibition fits within the museum’s oeuvre of pairing artists whose work shares an affinity – and in turn offers a new perspective – on the other.

“The NGV … has really championed an innovative model for exhibitions where we have in recent years presented two artists’ works alongside each other. So there was [Andy] Warhol and Ai Weiwei, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, for instance. But obviously all of those examples are men and none of them are actually fashion designers,” said Katie Somerville, co-curator of the exhibition alongside Danielle Whitfield.

A Rei Kawakubo design for Comme des Garcons from 2024.

“There was an opportunity to use that incredibly exciting model for pairing artists, but to do so this time looking at women, but also at two … of the most important, impactful and influential designers of our time who both happened to be women.”

Born a year apart and in different countries and cultures, both up-ended ideas of what fashion could be.

Westwood, who died in 2022, is often referred to as the godmother of punk. She was first known for her famous SEX shop she ran in London alongside one-time partner Malcolm McLaren outfitting punk bands, later for her collections that unpicked codes of Victoriana such as crinolines and corsets. Later in life, she became known for her activism.

Kawakubo, 82, is still working, not only creating avant-garde clothes that challenge representations of the body but also her successful Play diffusion line and Dover Street Market boutiques. She rarely gives interviews though in one she described herself as “businesswoman”.

Somerville said there were many affinities between the two women, including landmark collections in 1981 when Kawakubo presented in Paris for the first time and Westwood in London, both naming their collection Pirates.

A Vivienne Westwood design from 1993-94.

The exhibition will not be staged chronologically but split into themes. “Those themes really kind of came out of Danielle and I spending a lot of time, in a couple of years to this moment, acquiring works for the collection, researching works,” Somerville said.

“We’ve been working closely with both fashion houses … and through all of that kind of work, you end up having these penny-drop moments. And a lot of those are around their whole approach to being a fashion designer.”

She points to Westwood’s use of historical references and tailoring in her work, reimagining traditional fabrics such as Prince of Wales check, and Kawakubo’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the body with padding as examples of the pair challenging the status quo in fashion and culture.

The first theme of the exhibition is Punk and Provocation.

Tony Ellwood AM, director, NGV, said the exhibition celebrated two female fashion designers who pushed boundaries.

A Rei Kawakubo dress for Comme des Garcons in 2015.

A Vivienne Westwood dress for World's End in 1982.

“Westwood | Kawakubo invites audiences to reflect on the enduring legacies of these groundbreaking designers and contemplate the ways in which fashion can be a vehicle for self-expression and freedom,” he said.

Highlight pieces include Westwood’s early punk creations for bands such as The Sex Pistols, ­ pieces from Westwood’s 1993/94 Anglomania collection – for which Kate Moss famously walked and at which Naomi Campbell even more famously took a ­tumble on the runway – and seven pieces from Kawakubo’s Blood and Roses collection, all done in red.

“It goes right to the heart of … broader understanding of the term punk in terms of an attitude,” said Somerville. “Which is anti-Establishment … [and] up-ends our sense of hierarchies within fashion. The idea of what is taste, what is beautiful, what can be compelling, and the provocative aspect of that, is what sits at the heart of both their practices.”