MELBOURNE.- Opening 7 December 2025, the NGV’s world-premiere summer blockbuster exhibition pairs two global icons – and iconoclasts – of the fashion world for the first time, British designer Vivienne Westwood (1941 – 2022) and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo (b. 1942) of Comme des Garçons. Born a year apart in different countries and cultural contexts, each brought a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion design that subverted the status quo. Today, their critically acclaimed collections are celebrated globally for questioning conventions of taste, gender and beauty, as well as challenging the very form and function of clothing.
Through a showstopping display of nearly 150 innovative and ground-breaking designs, Westwood | Kawakubo explores the convergences and divergences between these two self-taught rebels of the fashion world. The exhibition brings together important loans from international museums and private collections – including New York’s Metropolitan Museum, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Palais Galliera, and the Vivienne Westwood archive – alongside 100+ outstanding works from the NGV Collection. The exhibition features more than 80 works that have recently entered the NGV Collection, including 40 outstanding works recently gifted to the NGV by Comme des Garçons especially for this exhibition.
Presented thematically, Westwood | Kawakubo charts the defining collections and concerns of their practices – from the mid-1970s to the present day – inviting audiences to consider the multiple ways that Westwood and Kawakubo have each rewritten fashion over the course of their careers. Alongside fashion, the exhibition also features archival materials, photography and runway footage, offering audiences a deep insight into the minds and creative processes of these two legends of contemporary fashion.
Exhibition highlights include Westwood’s iconic punk ensembles from the late 1970s, popularised by London bands such as The Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux; a romantic MacAndreas tartan gown from Westwood’s Anglomania collection (autumn-winter 1993-94), famously worn by Kate Moss on the runway; and the original version of the corseted Wedding dress from the Wake Up, Cave Girl Autumn-winter 2007-08 collection, famously worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and The City: The Movie.
In 2017, The Met in New York staged the exhibition, Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between, which opened with the cultural phenomenon the Met Gala. The NGV exhibition features a version of the sculptural petal ensemble worn by Rihanna on the red carpet, as well as key designs from collections of those worn by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Tracee Ellis Ross. Also on display are Kawakubo’s dramatic abstract works of the last two decades which challenge the relationship between the body and clothing. These include the playful Two Dimensions, spring-summer 2012, and the abstract forms of Invisible Clothes spring-summer 2017. The iconic sculptural gingham forms from Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection (spring-summer 1997) also feature.
Major showstopping moments in the exhibition include a dramatic, spotlit gallery highlighting how both designers have been influenced by fashion and dressmaking history: Westwood’s sweeping silk taffeta ball gowns inspired by 18th century court dress are presented alongside Kawakubo’s punk interpretations in pink vinyl and rich floral jacquard. A further dynamic display juxtaposes the bold, red tartans, English tweeds, grey plaids and navy pinstripes of Kawakubo with Westwood’s iconic tailoring. Sculptural, deconstructed, cinched and exaggerated silhouettes demonstrate their exacting approaches to cutting and textile traditions.
The exhibition design presents the two distinct voices of Westwood and Kawakubo as parallel yet fundamentally unique forces in fashion. The design uses symmetry as its cornerstone concept, presenting these designers like left and right hands; similar but not identical.
The exhibition explores Westwood and Kawakubo’s practices across five themes. Punk and Provocation considers how punk, both aesthetically and conceptually, crystallized in the early collections of each designer and has remained a touchstone, if not a design manifesto, throughout their careers. Highlight Westwood works in this section convey some of the key aspects of punk style – offensive graphics, bondage trousers, distressed knitwear, tartan, leather, safety pins and chains. In dialogue, four notable works by Kawakubo demonstrate the influence and ethos of punk in her practice.
Rupture explores the unique design lexicons of Westwood and Kawakubo, revealing how each have been driven by the desire to break free of convention and reinvent the rules of dress. Early highlights here include displays of Westwood’s Pirate (spring-summer 1981) and Nostalgia of Mud (autumn-winter 1983) collections that encapsulated the New Romantic and Buffalo movements of 1980s London, contrasted by recent works from Kawakubo’s ‘wearable objects’ series Not Making Clothes collection, spring-summer 2014, and her Neo Future, spring-summer 2020 which saw her question the boundaries between body and garment.
Reinvention looks at the way both designers have referenced the past or looked to the future, looking to sources of inspiration that include fashion history, tailoring traditions, decorative arts and textiles. For Westwood art history has been a constant influence, most notably in her Portrait collection (autumn-winter 1990), which featured prints of famous eighteenth century paintings by Boucher and Fragonard emblazoned on the corsetry. For Kawakubo, breaking the rules of taste has resulted in collections that bring together clashing pattern, ruffles and frills.
The Body: Freedom and Restraint explores the ways in which both Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo have consistently challenged existing conventions related to ideal and idealised female bodies and rallied against objectification. Beginning with iconic works from Westwood’s Erotic Zones collection (spring-summer 1995) and Kawakubo’s The Future of Silhouette (autumn-winter 2017-18), this section considers the ways in which both designers have redrawn the female body.
The final section of the exhibition, The Power of Clothes, considers fashion as a tool to convey a message, personal or political. It concludes with recent Westwood collections – Propaganda (autumn-winter 2025) and Chaos Point (autumn-winter 2008-09) – that utilise clothing as a canvas for messaging about the environment, social inequity or political freedoms in an echo of her early punk days. These are seen in context with the self-reflective power of one of Kawakubo’s recent and most poignant collections (Uncertain Future, spring-summer 2025). Here printed imagery alludes to global concerns and issues of individual and collective power and powerlessness.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an ambitious world-first publication, also titled Westwood | Kawakubo, exploring the intersecting histories of the designers with new reflections from industry experts including Bella Freud, Jane Mulvagh, Valerie Steele, Stephen Jones, Akiko Fukai, Chrissie Hynde, Alexander Fury, Ki Price, and Zandra Rhodes.
