Introducing Westwood | Kawakubo

‘I create clothes for people with a positive outlook, for those who wish to live freely, outside of conventions.’ – Rei Kawakubo¹The Sunday Times Magazine, 20 Nov. 1993, p. 84.

‘I think the real link that connects all my clothes is this idea of the heroic… clothes can give you a better life.’ – Vivienne Westwood²Ian Kelly & Vivienne Westwood, Vivienne Westwood, Picador, London, 2024, p. 371.

Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo are two of the most visionary and influential designers in recent fashion history. Iconoclasts who consistently challenged the ‘rules’ of dress, each has built a powerful body of work anchored in the desire for autonomy and radical aesthetic change. Born a year apart on opposite sides of the globe, both resisted rigid sociocultural expectations to find economic and artistic freedom through fashion. Equally strong-minded, innovative and unorthodox, their work similarly protests limiting concepts of dress, gender and beauty. And while neither describes themselves as feminists, each has used fashion to break down conventions.

Self-taught designers, Kawakubo and Westwood began their careers without the structure or foundation of formal training. This has enabled an expansive freedom in their approaches to making. It has also engendered a groundbreaking level of originality in their designs. Motivated by the belief that clothing should be ‘forceful and pose questions’, each has built a legacy of material, technical and conceptual innovation rooted in very singular understandings of what fashion can be.

In the NGV exhibition, Westwood and Kawakubo are placed in dialogue as women designers of equal measure. Visitors are invited to consider their extraordinary impact on fashion by examining the common interests and concerns that underscore their distinctive design methodologies. Westwood | Kawakubo celebrates divergence as much as convergence, looking at the different ways each designer has expressed their creativity. Following a non-linear structure that collapses past and present, thematic chapters (‘Punk and Provocation’, ‘Rupture and Reinvention’, ‘The Body’ and ‘The Power of Clothes’) juxtapose iconic collections and works from across the designers’ careers, with an emphasis on recent works for Kawakubo. The exhibition draws primarily from the NGV’s impressive holdings, alongside significant loans from leading international museums and private collectors.

Looking at each designer’s formative work in the late 1970s and 1980s, certain touchstones become evident. Westwood’s compulsion for provocation is one, the centrality of punk another, while for Kawakubo, it is a search for the new and unprecedented. The compulsion to say and create something original fuelled their early collections and was critical to the development of each’s distinct fashion vocabularies and methodologies. By the time Westwood debuted at London’s Olympia and Kawakubo staged her first international runway in Paris, both in 1981, each had already formulated a creative manifesto that would define their work in the decades to come.

Undeniably, Westwood and Kawakubo have reinvented the way we see fashion. Despite very different and idiosyncratic design methodologies, each navigate the dynamic between tradition and transgression. A consideration of their work in relation to collections that have specifically interrogated fashion’s fundamentals – such as historical dress, tailoring and dressmaking conventions, and patternmaking techniques – shows the relationship between their ideas and processes. At times the references are explicit and visible for all to see. In other instances, it is an utterly new proposition unmoored from any precedents.

For Westwood, art history and historical dress were always an enduring reference. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided her with her favoured items of dress: crinolines and corsetry. Westwood also playfully parodied Britishness in service of her long-standing critique of the establishment – whether in the realm of fashion, royalty, government or the upper classes. Nothing was off limits. While Westwood inclined towards the romantic and nostalgic, Kawakubo’s historicism, if present, is always abstracted. Her garment structures transcend their historical references through displacement and deconstruction.

Interest in tailoring traditions and menswear offers another point of intersection between the two designers. Over the course of their careers, both Westwood and Kawakubo have interrogated the underlying sexual politics, cultural tropes and gender codes of the discipline through innovative pattern-cutting and unorthodox material approaches. Yet while Westwood employed tailoring techniques to exaggerate the ‘feminine’ body, cinching and cutting close to the figure, an exploration of the same source material has led Kawakubo in a different direction. In 1995, Kawakubo commented ‘the basics of clothing lie in men’s fashion’, in reference to her longstanding interest in masculine codes of dress – trousers, shirts, shorts and blazers. Yet in her collections these elements are often fused with ‘feminine’ decorative tropes to confuse any gender binaries.

Both Westwood and Kawakubo have consistently experimented with bodily form and proposed alternative modes of embodiment throughout their careers. For Kawakubo, this has taken shape through neutrality and abstraction; for Westwood, through parody and exaggeration. In different but equally radical ways, their designs have interrogated the social and sexual body, exploring ideas of freedom and constraint, the experience and movement of wearing a garment, and the shifting boundary between the body and the garment. Both Westwood and Kawakubo have redrawn the shape of women’s bodies through enveloping form, padding or compression to critique the socially constructed form.

Intentionally, Westwood and Kawakubo have each harnessed the power of clothing as a tool to convey meaning. Remaining true to their iconoclastic roots, their late-career collections have continued to challenge, overturn, deconstruct or redefine aesthetic conventions. As provocateurs, their works champion the designers’ own value systems and concerns. Westwood was a vocal champion of political causes throughout her career, and in the last decade she became especially well known for campaigning for humanitarian and ecological causes, especially through Climate Revolution, which she founded in 2012. For Kawakubo, her outlook can appear deeply personal rather than global, even as her fashion argues for freedom and revolution. With her recent Uncertain Future collection for spring–summer 2025, incorporating imagery of protest banners related to environmental and LGBTQIA+ causes, Kawakubo’s intention was to articulate the possibility of hope in a chaotic world.

In unsurprising synchronicity, Kawakubo’s and Westwood’s work in the early twentieth century retains the throughlines of protest and progress. Surveying their work over the last five decades, it is easy to see why it continues to resonate. Their legacy is one of creativity, design originality and technical mastery. It is also the willingness to consider the relationship between oneself and fashion and the wider world, and to have the courage to stand by one’s beliefs.

Katie Somerville is NGV Senior Curator, Fashion & Textiles, and Danielle Whitfield is NGV Curator, Fashion and Textiles.

This essay was first published in the Nov–Dec 2025 issue of NGV Magazine, available now from NGV design store.

Notes