This catalogue accompanies The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition.

“What I’ve only ever been interested in are clothes that one has never seen before, that are completely new, and how in what way they can be expressed. Is that called fashion? I don’t know the answer.” —Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is widely recognized as among the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years. Since her Paris debut in 1981, she has blurred the divide between art and fashion and transformed customary notions of beauty, identity, and the body.

This lavishly illustrated publication weaves an illuminating narrative around Kawakubo’s experiments in oppositions and the spaces between boundaries. Brilliant new photographs of more than 120 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons accompanied by Kawakubo’s commentary on her designs and process, reveal her conceptual and challenging aesthetic as never before. A chronology of Kawakubo’s career provides additional context, and an insightful conversation with the author offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this fashion visionary.

• By Andrew Bolton
• Photography by Nicholas Alan Cope, Inez & Vinoodh, Katerina Jebb, Kazumi Kurigami, Ari Marcopoulos, Craig McDean, Brigitte Niedermair, Paolo Roversi, and Collier Schorr
• Also includes a bonus foldout poster featuring 2 Dimensions, autumn/winter 2012–13 and Invisible Clothes, spring/summer 2017.