First Look: Inside NGV’s Monumental Vivienne Westwood x Rei Kawakubo Exhibition – a Clash of Punk Titans

It begins on an urban street. Kind of. Canvas-white paste-up posters overlap along the corridor with screens playing archival footage from London and Tokyo, the cities that shaped two of fashion’s greatest iconoclasts: Dame Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, the founder of Comme des Garçons. 

A throbbing band of white light wraps the reversed runway, starting at the point where a model might pause and turn, instead drawing you backstage. Here, that backstage is a portal into the designers’ interpretive worlds. 

The Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition brings together more than 140 designs – 40 of which were gifted by Kawakubo for the show – to form a dialogue between the works of two of fashion’s most daring, revolutionary and captivating designers. And although the British Westwood and Japanese Kawakubo rarely crossed paths socially or professionally, 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.” 

That tension – shared reference points expressed through radically different instincts – becomes a throughline that structures the show, she says. “You get this fascinating fusion space in the middle that’s sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected, where their ideas start to speak to each other.”

Cross the backstage threshold and those worlds open up: a catalogue of Westwood and Kawakubo charting the places where their works converge, diverge and collide. The scale shifts, too – the rooms feel larger than usual, stretched to hold the weight of themes like Punk and Provocation, Rapture, Reinvention, and The Body and The Power of Clothes. 

At the centre, brutalist pillars rise like the ribs of a cathedral where we’re to worship masterful garments, including the tartan wedding gown modelled by Kate Moss from Westwood’s winter 1993 collection, Anglomania. At the altar is another icon: the 2007 Wake Up Cave Girl wedding dress, better known today as Carrie Bradshaw’s ill-fated gown in Sex and the City: The Movie.

Further on, it constricts to a tighter artery-red heart-like room with Comme des Garçons’ autumn/winter 2016 Blood and Roses collection, with which Kawakubo outruns her own black-loving legacy by proclaiming “red is black”.  

Immediately beyond the entry runway is Punk and Provocation, split in the middle between the two designers. On one side, Westwood’s 1970s London punk explodes with iconic bondage graphics that got a shop assistant arrested for indecency, slashed slogan tees, tartan and tight-laced rebellion. On the other, Kawakubo’s vision of punk appears less literal but just as charged: black, vinyl, chain illusions, and deconstruction as a language of its own. 

“Westwood herself described Rei Kawakubo as ‘punk at heart’,” says Somerville. “The synergy is clearest in the materiality.” 

Westwood and Kawakubo were born just a year apart, yet grew up in vastly different worlds – in Derbyshire 1941 and Tokyo in 1942. Neither trained in fashion design, both entered the field from elsewhere – Westwood from primary-school teaching, Kawakubo from styling – and built their careers outside the traditional French atelier system. That independence became the backbone that defined them both.

“It’s not that their work is the same, it’s that their philosophies, ideas and attitudes share deep currents,” says Somerville. “A liberated approach to design that refuses to follow the rules.” Each interrogates the same themes – gender, the body, history, rebellion – but arrives at entirely different outcomes. 

From this shared sense of defiance, they splinter into different directions.

For Westwood, it manifests in punk humour, eroticised silhouettes, and a subversive sense of theatre that turned the runway into a pop culture generator.

The museum houses two of her most recognisable moments: the micro miniskirt from 1994’s Elizabethan-inspired Café Society, worn by a topless Kate Moss eating a Magnum ice-cream; and the Anglomania skirt Naomi Campbell wore during her only career runway fall – cut in the MacAndreas tartan Westwood developed with weavers Lochcarron of Scotland.

Nearby, replica crown jewels surround one of Westwood’s orb handbags, summoning the memory of the “mother of punk” twirling and flashing her no-knickers at Buckingham Palace after receiving an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II.

Her revolution happened everywhere: on runways, red carpets, royal abodes and in the subcultures she helped dress, from the Sex Pistols to London’s late-’70s New Romantic movements.

Kawakubo’s anti-establishment streak, meanwhile, appears through garments that ignore the body: androgynous, asymmetrical, sometimes post-apocalyptic in silhouette. 

For Kawakubo, clothes are a vessel of an idea rather than the idea itself, blurring the boundaries between body, sculpture and clothing. Even her retail spaces became part of that philosophy. Early Comme des Garçons stores in Tokyo famously had no mirrors, a deliberate refusal of fashion’s vanity that forced wearers to focus on how the clothes felt, not how they looked. 

And, like Westwood, she rejected establishment expectations. When honoured with a national merit by Japan’s imperial family, she refused to attend the ceremony.

Their differences crystallise most clearly in the Reinvention rooms, where both designers mine the 18th century for source material, only to push it in opposite directions.

In Comme des Garçons’ autumn/winter 2016 collection, Kawakubo turns rococo opulence punk. Pink vinyl and floral silk jacquards swell into armour-like silhouettes inspired by dauphins and samurai. Most recognisable from this collection might be the floral jacquard ruffle piece now coined “the Rihanna dress” after the pop icon wore it to the 2017 Met Gala.

“Kawakubo literally went back to the 18th-century centres of textile practice to develop these fabrics,” says Somerville. “The touchstones to history are there, even if the end result is radically different.”

Westwood’s return to the 18th century pushes in a different direction, as anatomy instead of armour. Across her career she raided the 18th century for its structures – panniers, corsetry, underpinnings – dragging them into daylight as outerwear and charging them with erotic energy. “For Westwood, tailoring enhances and exaggerates the body – bosoms, bottoms, voluptuous curves – reclaiming the suit as a hyper-feminine form,” says Somerville.    

To celebrate these two artists whose legacies grew bigger than themselves, the exhibition closes with the works both designers used to speak back to the world that made them icons. Westwood’s Chaos Point garments, covered in illustrations of an eco-warrior as imagined by Nottingham schoolchildren, sit opposite Kawakubo’s Uncertain Future pieces, where images of protest placards – mostly from queer-rights marches – and photographs of displacement camps sit enmeshed beneath tulle.

It’s a fitting finale for an exhibition about designers who never followed rules to begin with. And it’s a monumental exhibition for Melbourne, a city that lauds itself for a rebel streak and love of the underground.

“I hope people leave with an appreciation of their bravery and radicalism, their willingness to go against the grain. Sometimes people don’t know what they want because it doesn’t exist yet; these designers created it,” says Somerville. “And honestly, Melbourne’s love of black will mean real empathy for Kawakubo.”

Westwood | Kawakubo opens at NGV International on December 7, 2025, and runs until April 19, 2026. Tickets are available now. 

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