Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo is a Japanese fashion designer and the founder of Comme des Garçons. Born in 1942, she established a practice that questions conventional ideas of beauty, fit and the relationship between clothing and the body. Her designs have used asymmetry, unfinished surfaces and unexpected volume to challenge familiar silhouettes.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted its 2017 Costume Institute exhibition, Art of the In-Between, to her work. It examined the ways her collections cross boundaries between fashion and art, presence and absence, and object and wearer. The exhibition included her 1997 Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body collection, with its conspicuously padded forms.