Westwood | Kawakubo After-Hours Tour at NGV

With NGV’s summer blockbuster Westwood | Kawakubo freshly opened, stylish Melburnians are already flocking to see the works of two of fashion’s greatest iconoclasts: Dame Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons. 

The immense show features more than 140 designs pulled from the NGV’s permanent display, international museums and private collections. Iconic Westwood pieces – like Carrie Bradshaw’s ill-fated SATC wedding dress and the Anglomania mini Naomi Campbell took a tumble in – sit alongside legendary Kawakubo designs such as her Blood and Roses collection, wherein she proclaimed “red is black”.  

Emerging in the 1970s, both self-taught designers brought a rule-breaking radicalism to the fashion world. And although the two rarely crossed paths in life, their work seems to agree on a fundamental conviction: fashion is a means to question authority, disrupt gender conventions, and rewrite the rules of beauty and form.

“They both draw on history,” says NGV senior curator Katie Somerville, “but the ways they reinterpret the past are completely different.”

The exhibition runs December 7, 2025 to April 19, 2026. And Broadsheet Access members will be among the first to see the sights with an exclusive after-hours tour on December 16.

Want to see all that punk brashness up close and personal and have the exhibition (practically) to yourself? Log in or join Access today.

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Images above:

1. Vivienne Westwood Outfits from the Portrait collection, autumn–winter 1990–91 (detail). London, March 1990. Photo © John van Hasselt / Sygma via Getty Images. Models: Susie Bick & Denice D. Lewis

2. L: Vivienne Westwood Look 49, from the Anglomania collection, autumn–winter 1993–94. Paris, March 1993. Photo © firstVIEW. Model: Kate Moss / R: Vivienne Westwood Evening bolero and dress, from the Erotic Zones collection, spring–summer 1995. Paris, October 1994. Photo © PL Gould / IMAGES via Getty Images. Model: Linda Evangelista

3. L: Comme des Garçons Look 4, from the Blood and Roses collection, spring–summer 2015. Paris, September 2014.  Image © Comme des Garçons. Model: Andrea Hrncirova / R: Comme des Garçons Look 1, from the 18th-Century Punk collection, autumn–winter 2016–17. Paris, March 2016. Image © Comme des Garçons. Model: Anna Cleveland