Fashion Royalty: NGV’s Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo Blockbuster Summer Exhibition

At their best, fashion designers leave an indelible mark on culture. Designers who challenge the status quo don’t just change the way we dress but can have ripple effects on our notions of gender, power and identity.

Today, the NGV announced its big summer exhibition, a world premiere retrospective of Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo. It’s a milestone exhibition for many reasons.

Australia’s oldest gallery has a habit of pairing artists together for exhibitions: think Warhol and Weiwei and Basquiat and Haring.

“At the NGV, we’ve had this history of looking at the work of two designers in dialogue, but we’ve never done women, and we’ve never done fashion,” Danielle Whitfield, NGV’s curator of fashion and textiles, tells Broadsheet.

Westwood and Kawakubo, born a year apart in England and Japan respectively, are iconoclasts in their own right. “These two women are two of the most radical and visionary designers of the last century,” Whitfield says. “Putting them in dialogue, we’re not ever suggesting that their work is the same … but both of them are really interesting because they’ve always challenged the status quo.”

The late Westwood, heralded as the “mother of punk”, was one of Britain’s most influential fashion designers. From her penis pendant necklaces and rubber fetish wear, to her Harris tweed and plaid fascinations, Westwood’s anti-establishment values have cemented her as a timeless avant-garde icon.

Kawakubo founded the Japanese fashion house Comme des Garçons in 1969. Over half a century, the historically private designer has cemented her longstanding reputation of being a radical, unorthodox and conceptually driven designer. Kawakubo is at the forefront of the wearable art movement though, at times, her pieces veer more towards un wearable. As New York Times writer Matthew Schneier said back in 2017, “Many designers work with the goal of making women look good. Kawakubo seems to work with the goal of making women look again.”

It’s known that Kawakubo visited Westwood’s Worlds End shop in London and that Westwood became quite involved in Japan’s fashion scene in the ’80s. The pair worked on a small collaboration in the 2000s. Despite the similarities in their sartorial legacies, Westwood and Kawakubo didn’t share an interpersonal relationship.

“They didn’t intersect very often in a social sense [but] they both had a deep respect for one another, and I think they were both very aware of each other’s work,” Whitfield says. “[They were] circling around each other without ever actually being in each other’s pockets.”

Both Kawakubo and Westwood have challenged our conventions of fashion, beauty and bodies. “We’ve grown to expect more from fashion, and I think that’s what these two in particular have really shown us,” Whitfield says.

More than 140 pieces from Westwood and Kawakubo will be displayed for the exhibition – 40 of which were recently gifted and hand-selected by Kawakubo herself.

Westwood | Kawakubo is on display from December 7 at NGV International.

ngv.vic.gov.au