Inside the world-first NGV exhibition uniting fashion icons Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo
A landmark exhibition showcasing rebel fashion revolutionaries Rei Kawakubo and Vivienne Westwood is opening at the NGV next month, here’s what you can expect.
A palpable sense of anticipation in the Parisian restaurant is building. So too the crowd, dressed in every shade of black. Layer upon layer of pleated tunics, asymmetric patchwork blazers, frayed hems.
To the outsider, it is immediately apparent you have found the right place.
The murder of street-style crows is the Comme des Garçons devotees. The CDG team is flocking to the cafe before the unveiling of its Spring/Summer ’26 show, to take place in a nondescript concrete car park around the corner in less than an hour.
Disciples more like it.
Because the iconic fashion empire founded by Rei Kawakubo is much more than a label. It is an identity. A religion. Kawakubo their god.
Sitting opposite wearing a chic beret and, well, rightly so, head-to-toe black, is mad hatter Stephen Jones.
One of the world’s most famous milliners, it’s a tea party for two as he sips and talks in between being greeted and fawned over by the now milling Comme-gregation.
He reminisces about his time with the designers and explains the significance of Melbourne being chosen to host a world-first exhibition combining two of fashion’s great revolutionaries and disrupters, Rei Kawakubo and Vivienne Westwood, at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Jones has worked with many of the greats of our time, from John Galliano’s debut and, into his creative heyday, Princess Diana of Wales, to just two days prior feverishly fitting hat pins to his tricorn pieces backstage for creative director Jonathan Anderson’s highly anticipated Dior runway debut.
He has just finished texting with Galliano himself about the latest Dior show.
But we are here to talk about the fearless female rebels of change.
Jones has a long history of having worked with both designers and is making more than 60 pieces for the upcoming exhibition.
He will be attending the NGV Gala, which has now sealed itself as a major event to open the summer blockbuster each year, and is reminiscing about how he met each of them by chance.
It was Kawakubo who first walked up to him when he was in an airport while on a layover in Japan to tell him she admired his work.
“It was 5000 years ago when you used to have layovers and stop in Asia because you couldn’t fly over Russian airspace,” Jones says.
“I met Rei in the duty free there. She approached me and she said, ‘I like your hats.’
“I didn’t realise who she was. It was my assistant who came over and said, ‘You idiot, you know that’s Rei Kawakubo.’
“So she invited us for dinner. We turned right, she turned left. But that was it.
“If you look back on your life, so many things like that are just by chance.”
His first meeting with Westwood left a different footprint.
On the dancefloor at London lesbian nightclub, Soho institution Club Louise — it was the only place that would allow punks like him in at the time — he trod on Westwood’s foot.
“It was 1976. The first year of punk,” Jones says.
“They’d be playing Siouxsie and the Banshees and all these different people. We would be pogoing a bit. But people were sitting around and drinking too.
“But the last record of the evening came on — obvious because it was a lesbian club really, it was Isn’t She Lovely by Stevie Wonder.
“Suddenly, Vivienne and I were the only people on the dance floor. And we shuffled together, and I said, ‘Hello, Vivienne.’
“I’d been to her shop, naturally. It was called Sex back then and she said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I’m a student at St Martin’s School of Art doing fashion.’
“And she went, ‘Ewwwww’.
“I thought I was very clever, you see. She sneered at me. And then I accidentally just trod on her foot,” he laughs. “But we became quite good friends afterwards.”
We can largely thank Jones for this year’s Westwood | Kawakubo event taking place.
The concept was conceived more than two years ago by NGV senior fashion and textiles curators Katie Somerville and Danielle Whitfield.
The gallery has enjoyed great success pairing artists, from Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei in 2015 to Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2019.
Combining the two iconoclasts of punk fashion works initially raised eyebrows, with many believing they should have their own solo shows.
But Jones says the Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition is a perfect match given the similar impact both had on fashion over the past 40 years.
But convincing Kawakubo and the Comme des Garçons team took a little bit of work behind the seams.
“Fortunately enough I was able to be a bit of a cupid in that situation,” Jones smiles coquettishly.
“I know Katie quite well. And I know the people at Comme des Garçons and I know how it operates.
“They’re not protective of what they do. But they like things to be done in a specific way and quite reasonably so. Because you want to make sure the story is told properly.
“I think the fact that it’s in Australia is more appealing than if the exhibition was in Paris or New York.
“Because Australia is a new place and maybe it has to try harder. And I think Melbourne’s probably more interesting.”
When Comme des Garçons say they’re in for the show, they mean it, going all in.
Nothing is not thought through. Precision and time have been dedicated to every last detail.
Kawakubo has gifted the gallery 45 pieces, with a crack-Comme team soon arriving to help the setup and installation.
From December 7, more than 140 innovative and groundbreaking works, many from the gallery’s own extensive archive, and loans from museums and private collectors will be displayed from the two unorthodox, self-taught designers born just a year apart from 1941.
Set across five themes, the exhibition will delve into eras from punk and provocation, to reinvention, rupture and the power of clothes.
“The relationship between the two women in a funny way, is it important or not? No, it isn’t. Because they are perhaps in parallel. But capturing the sensibility of the moment, is why they’re still so important,” Jones explains.
“If you think of important fashion happenings, there is Chanel introducing the comfort of menswear to women’s clothing.
“There is Dior with the new look, and he was doing this thing which was a fantasy and wonderful after the hardships of the war.
“And Vivienne and Rei responded to, well what were they responding to?
“The nanny stage? Raging against the machine? Rebellion and freedom. That’s why they’re doing an exhibition of it.
“If people didn’t think their work is important, they’d just be forgotten.”
It’s showtime at the catwalk.
The Comme-crows and men in black are front row. Some others like multi-hyphenate musician turned Louis Vuitton menswear artistic director Pharrell Williams, Loverboy founder Charles Jeffrey, a K-Pop star with an entourage taking selfies, and fashion’s dark lord Rick Owens’ partner, shapeshifter French designer Michele Lamy, all give their Parisian air-kissing hellos to Jones.
Soon he begins chatting to Met Gala visionary curator Andrew Bolton.
Bolton knows CDG work, having taken 13 years to finally convince the Japanese designer to stage an exhibition for the costume institute in her name, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Redefining Fashion, in 2017.
The architectural wonder worn by Rihanna to the Met Gala — inspired by 18th century punks from the previous year’s collection — consisting of floral fabrics, layered and pulled apart like petals, will be on show at the NGV.
But now the eager anticipation has turned to hushed reverence as the fluorescent lights fade to black — only to smack back on with a jump scare. Primal, haunting chanting and pipes begin. We are attending a service, a ritual. Because Kawakubo’s work transcends fashion, a collection turned ceremony begins to unfold.
Piece after piece of bundled burlap, calico and other fabrics eerily appear, sometimes stiffly, and head down the runway, raw yet hopeful. There are tattered edges, abstract shapes, mind-bending silhouettes, lace and deflated dresses over inside-out frayed seams, and deconstructed sleeves poking out like extra appendages. Tall straw hats and detritus bundled on heads skim the low-ceilinged runway’s glaring lights.
“I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from the damaging of perfect things,” Kawakubo said in a note distributed after the show, which she titled “After the dust”.
It leaves a deep impression. A seat at the cult of Comme.
Kawakubo’s work was not always treated with such admiration in Paris. She was famously jeered at when she first began to show in the fashion capital in 1981 after founding the Tokyo-based label in 1969.
Kawakubo reinterpreted the body-clothes relationship, and in doing so the conventional Western canon of beauty.
“When Rei first came to the West and started to show in Paris, people were so shocked,” Jones reflects. “Nobody had ever seen anything like that before, because their standard of beauty was a couture dress, which was beautiful, but this was a very, very different aesthetic.
“People were really freaked out by it.”
To those who were unable to evaluate her work, Kawakubo boldly declared: “Comme des Garçons makes clothes that are not what has been seen before. Not what has been repeated. Instead, new discoveries that look towards the future.”
It was a new concept of beauty.
“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 has said.
“It really challenged that beauty was not only a Saint Laurent evening dress worn by a woman with a beautiful blonde hairdo and diamond earrings, but that beauty could be a hole in a jumper or frayed hem, or an unusual asymmetric cut,” Jones says.
“How many people now show a frayed hem? It’s all from Vivienne — I mean Rei, it’s funny I said Vivienne there.”
When talking of his friend, British-born designer Vivienne Westwood who died in 2022 at the age of 81, Jones gets caught up with emotion.
He was going to wear a black-on-black tweed crown and mourning attire to her funeral, but on the day it felt wrong.
“So I got my old crown out and my old Vivienne Westwood T-shirt, that I spent so much money on — I mean, I literally lived off baked beans for six months. And my Seditionaries trousers, and I wore just an old outfit that I’d had since the early ’80s,” Jones, 68, says.
“That felt right. It was a great service,” he says, holding back tears.
A Westwood tartan crown will be part of the exhibition, along with the provocative slogan T-shirts, safety pins and bondage trousers.
“She’s gone. But actually, she’s still really with us. Just as much as ever. Her influence is all around.” This sentiment and the passion Westwood brought to everything she put her mind to is shared later when talking to one of her entourage, UK photographer Ki Price.
Westwood had taken Price under her wing after the two worked together on some fashion shows where he was a freelancer.
He now protectively owns an extensive catalogue of photographs and portraits of Westwood, a selection of which will display throughout the NGV exhibition.
They show a different side to the rebel designer, who is perhaps more well known mainstream for her influence on Britain’s punk movement and with collaborator Malcolm McLaren, who managed the Sex Pistols.
Westwood famously wore no knickers meeting the Queen and was anti-authority to the end. She used fashion as a tool for her activism.
Price, who went on to capture celebrity portraits from Amy Winehouse to Bob Dylan, would have just a half-hour’s notice to get down to a protest.
“Sometimes I’d get a call from her team who’d say, ‘Where are you? We’re doing this thing.’ Lucky I ride motorbikes,” he chuckles.
“Even though she was such a big name in London, she rode her bike everywhere.
“I found it very intimate working with Vivienne and photographing the protests. It felt like it was just you and her,” Price says.
“I started working with her on a more personal level around 2014 when she asked me to photograph a seven-day tour of the UK to protest fracking.”
It was there that he captured his favourite image of her, taken on the beach at Gower Peninsula during a tour stop in Wales.
“Vivienne’s son Joe Corre was a fellow anti-fracking activist and found this Welsh flag and plate in a charity shop. I never thought I’d be asking her to get naked on the beach but she didn’t care. We draped the flag around her and she took out a Sharpie and wrote Talk Fracking on the plate. When I look at this picture now, I see Vivienne’s strength and legacy. Everything is in this image. She had that power in her.”
He was among a small group of mourners to attend Westwood’s burial. But the service was for everyone.
Jones remembers many of her activist friends talking about various causes. But it was actor Helena Bonham Carter’s words that stood out most to him.
“Helena got up and she said, ‘Yes, she did all that, but you’re wrong … it was all about the clothes.’
“She said, ‘I wake up in the morning, and I’m a dumpy, not particularly attractive girl from North London. But I can put Vivienne Westwood clothes on, and I become Helena Bonham Carter.’”
The armour. The identity.
Unlike other designers, Kawakubo famously doesn’t come out at the end of her shows. But tradition calls for the team to all meet for a last supper with her afterwards, inside the CDG showroom on Paris Vendome.
The now 83-year-old designer is across every element of her radical avant-garde designs.
She sees herself dually as a clothesmaker and a businesswoman who has built a universe that includes more than a dozen diffusion lines under the CDG umbrella, from accessories to perfumes.
Unlike many of the Parisian luxury designers, their logos virtually shout from their various shopfront windows and high-end boutiques along Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré — not so CDG. It is almost hard to find given there is no signage.
But inside, every detail of the minimalist store, which feels a bit like inside an art gallery, has been designed by the founder.
The team is describing how the pieces will have elements, from the humble materials and fabrics used, of some of the designs incorporated into the ready-to-wear collection.
Again every detail thought through, her eye across it all.
Upstairs from the busy showroom of buyers and clients sits Kawakubo. Her distinctive black bob looking down from her glass window, watching. Seeing all.
Alice Coster travelled to Paris as a guest of the National Gallery of Victoria. Westwood | Kawakubo opens at the NGV, December 7 to April 19, 2026
Originally published as Inside the world-first NGV exhibition uniting fashion icons Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo
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