This story originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Vogue Australia.
In an unremarkable office building, stripped bare during renovations in Paris’s Montparnasse, guests hurried inside. An autumn downpour claimed some of the crowd without umbrellas, but their haste had much more to do with the impending spring/summer 2026 Comme des Garçons show. In contrast to the frenzy, the brand’s staff calmly greeted people individually at the door, among them Adrian Joffe, the label’s president and husband to the woman of the hour Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons’s creative director.
As the show commenced, models in Kawakubo’s creations were let loose, floating onto the stage to acapella vocals of Spanish experimental singer Fátima Miranda. The first was like an undulating, cocooning column that opened like a giant clam to a jolting slice of Comme des Garçons red. Then came hessian and openwork crochet, calico and cotton enclosed forms, some tied in gargantuan knots. Other looks appeared like stacked cushions in domestic fabrics: upholstery and seed sacks, lace doilies and cotton—a humble, honest jumble in tender shades of pink. It gave the feel of personal belongings gathered and bundled in haste in a dystopian future, fitting for a collection named After The Dust. One look was made up of columns, like giant rolled-up table linen or carpet, one askew and cantilevering from a model’s shoulder like a third arm. A bulbous form encircled another’s torso, its raw hem flipped to reveal an interior membrane the color of strawberry milk. Then a pause. Near complete stillness descended before a trio of finale dresses appeared, each paired with headpieces like flattened papal mitres sitting askance, so tall models had to gently dip their heads under a ceiling beam.
The effect was, as always with Kawakubo, potent, beguiling and not immediately comprehensible. Since the Japanese-born creative began showing in Paris in 1981, Kawakubo-san, as her staff call her, and her shows have been subject to more scrutiny, obsession and citation than that of most other designers, living or dead.
Back then, she shocked the establishment with her disruptive black looks—an affront to the glamour-obsessed ’80s—at the InterContinental. Both then and now, she refuses to justify her work and rarely explains it. Instead, she has earned enviable levels of respect and industry-wide deference, bordering on near-mythic veneration. Kawakubo now leads an empire that includes more than 200 stores, including one in Melbourne, 17 sub-labels—many led by Kawakubo protégées like Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya—and high-concept, multi-brand boutique Dover Street Market, the first of which opened in 2004.
The inscrutable quality of her work can be experienced first-hand at a joint retrospective of her creations and those of the late Vivienne Westwood at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) exhibition Westwood | Kawakubo, opening this month. An Australian first, it will feature an unprecedented number of Kawakubo’s garments in this country, including nearly all of the 45 looks gifted by the label. There will be more than 140 designs from both designers on display sourced from the NGV Collection and loaned from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among others. Fashion students, casual fashion followers and seasoned industry insiders alike will have the rare chance to get up close to Kawakubo’s runway designs from legendary collections like 1997’s Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body.
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