Vivienne Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Derbyshire in 1941. Moving to London as a teenager, she briefly attended Harrow Art School before training as a teacher and working in a primary school. In the 1970s, after meeting Malcolm McLaren, the pair became creative collaborators and opened a series of boutiques on the King’s Road in Chelsea – spaces that became a youth fashion mecca with a radical influence on international fashion. The pair later shifted from street fashion to the industry’s heartland, presenting collections at London and Paris fashion weeks.

From 1984, Westwood began designing independently, presenting her first solo collection in 1985 and ushering in a new era that fused punk’s anti-fashion spirit with the craftsmanship of haute couture. From this period onwards, her work reimagined Savile Row bespoke tailoring and British textiles, using parody and provocation to challenge accepted ideas of taste and gender.

Westwood revived the corset, crinoline and bustle, transforming symbols of restriction into emblems of subversion. Her rebellious and provocative designs revealed not a rejection but a deep engagement with history, drawing inspiration from art and fashion archives, including those of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection. In later decades, Westwood channelled her creative platform into activism, passionately campaigning for environmental and social causes, generating a lasting anti-authoritarian impact on and off the runway.

Born in Tokyo in 1942, Rei Kawakubo graduated from Keio University in 1964 with a degree in fine art and aesthetics. After working as a stylist, she began designing her own clothes and, in 1969, founded the label Comme des Garçons. In 1981, Kawakubo made her Paris debut – the first in a series of presentations that would establish her as one of the most radical and uncompromising voices in fashion.

From the outset, Kawakubo was determined to make clothes that, in her words, ‘did not exist before’. Her designs have subverted the norms of garment shape and function, reframed ideas of beauty, and proposed a new relationship between body and dress. Throughout the 1980s, her use of black, distressed fabrics and asymmetrical forms introduced a new visual and conceptual vocabulary to fashion. Her 1996 collection Body Meets Dress–Dress Meets Body collapsed the boundary between body and garment, radically distorting the silhouette.

Today, Kawakubo continues to test the limits of fashion through pioneering concepts and innovative design methods. Her recent runway collections are defined by enveloping and abstract ‘objects for the body’ that question what clothing can be. In its powerful originality, Kawakubo’s work defies convention, reframing how we see and think about fashion, beauty, agency and identity.

‘We weren’t only rejecting the values of the older generation; we were rejecting their taboos as well.’
—Westwood​, 2004

‘I’ve always felt an affinity with the punk spirit. I like that word. Every collection is that. Punk is against flattery, and that’s what I like about it.’
—Kawakubo, 2013

From their earliest collections, Westwood and Kawakubo positioned themselves as provocateurs – designers who challenged the hierarchies of fashion and the politics of beauty and taste.

In the mid 1970s, Westwood, along with her then-partner Malcolm McLaren, brought the visual language of punk into fashion. Rips, tartan, bondage-wear and confrontational graphics transformed clothing into protest – emblems of anarchic, anti-authoritarian style.

A decade later, Kawakubo declared she would ‘start from zero’ and ‘do things not done before.’ Like Westwood, she created without compromise, introducing asymmetry, enveloping volumes, and the use of black and distressed fabrics into Western fashion vernacular.

Original garments from Westwood and McLaren’s stores SEX and Seditionaries highlight early punk style and demonstrate how Westwood transformed clothing into a tool to claim agency and power. Contemporary and conceptual works by Kawakubo show how she continues to channel punk’s spirit of rebellion – not simply its visual language, but also its ethos of transgression and defiance.

In 1981, Kawakubo presented her first international runway in Paris, a collection now known as Pirates. That same year, Westwood also made her runway debut in London at the Olympia, with her collection similarly titled Pirate. These collections marked distinct creative ruptures: each representative of a new design manifesto that would define their work for decades to come.

For Westwood, Pirate marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with historical cutting techniques, innovative fabric treatments and the destabilisation of gendered dress. Across the collections of 1981–85, she fused references from antiquity, historic and global dress, streetwear, art and queer culture, creating an eclectic and intellectually curious fashion vocabulary.

For Kawakubo, Pirates – and the groundbreaking collections that followed – embodied her modernist spirit and commitment to the new and original, realised through experimental patternmaking, the creation of specialist textiles and the continual questioning of clothing forms and gender codes.

Yet it is Kawakubo’s refusal to look backwards, and her conceptual resolve to ‘break the idea of clothes’, that define her work in the twenty-first century. From 2014 onwards, her collections – made solely for the runway or to order – illuminate her singular design language. Exaggerated and sculptural forms, freed from the body, represent the purest expression of her pursuit of the new and ongoing recalibration of fashion.

A study of Westwood’s and Kawakubo’s work reveals a tension between tradition and transgression. Both demonstrate a deep understanding of the fundamentals of fashion – tailoring, dressmaking and textiles – even as they resist and rewrite these orthodoxies.

Westwood’s work often looked to art and fashion history for inspiration. Through study of museum archives and historical pattern books, her 1990s collections reinterpreted the opulence of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reclaiming the corset and crinoline as symbols of sexual liberty.

Kawakubo rarely quotes the past so directly. Her references, if present, are always abstracted. In 18th-Century Punk, she borrows silhouettes and fabrics from the period only to recalibrate them, denying familiarity and embracing transformation.

Both Westwood and Kawakubo share an interest in Western tailoring traditions and menswear. Throughout their careers, they have interrogated the cultural tropes of tailoring, sexual politics and gender codes through innovative pattern-cutting and unorthodox material choices.

In the late 1980s, Westwood revived English wools, tweeds and Scottish tartans, embracing tailoring techniques associated with mid-century French couture and the bespoke suiting of Savile Row. Her precisely cinched and close-fitting cuts celebrated and exaggerated the body’s curves to empower rather than constrain the ‘feminine’ form.

Kawakubo has long examined what she calls ‘the basics of clothing’ found in menswear: trousers, shirts, shorts and blazers. Through deconstruction and fusion, the rejection of function or repositioning of pattern pieces, she subverts every aspect of the tailoring process. Her work often juxtaposes utility with typically ‘feminine’ ornament to further destabilise gender binaries and expectations of fit and form.

As self-taught designers, both Kawakubo and Westwood began their careers without formal training, which has enabled an expansive freedom in their approaches to making.

Kawakubo’s design process is driven by a continual search for new aesthetic ideas and a refusal to accept convention as a creative limit. In the past, a collection could emerge from an abstract phrase, a photograph or something as unexpected as a crumpled piece of paper. Today, it might emerge from an emotion or a moment of introspection. Whatever the source, Kawakubo’s designs always resist the logics of fashion: they reject function, explode form and scale, and demand new methods of construction. Colour is central, as is challenging the traditional hierarchies of materials – elevating those that might once have been dismissed as kitsch, cheap or overly feminine.

Westwood often sought inspiration from the past. In the 1980s and 90s, she conflated time periods – ancient Greece and Rome, Tudor England, eighteenth-century France – crafting narratives, characters, silhouettes and decorative techniques that celebrated and subverted tradition. Nothing was off limits. In service of her longstanding critique of the establishment, Westwood parodied the clichés of Britishness – aristocratic and royal dress, twinsets and pearls, school-boy stripes, hunting attire and tartan – producing collections that playfully mocked class and conformity.

Across their careers Westwood and Kawakubo have reimagined the relationship between fashion and the body. In distinct, but equally radical ways both have questioned social constructs, challenged fashion industry standards, and explored the tension between freedom and constraint, comfort and objectification.

For Kawakubo, the body has long been a site of conceptual exploration. Her Body Meets Dress–Dress Meets Body collection, presented in 1996, used irregular padding to distort the silhouette and blur the boundary between body and garment. In 2012, she used two-dimensional pattern-cutting to create ‘flat’ clothing that disregarded the contours of the body altogether. Most recently, her collections have evolved into ‘wearable objects’: extreme, sculptural works that abandon comfort and function to critique socially constructed ideas of clothing forms and beauty.

Westwood has similarly contested precepts of sexual expression and the ‘fashionable body’ but did so through irony and exaggeration. Rejecting the minimalist ‘waif’ aesthetic of the early 1990s, she created hyper-feminine silhouettes through padding and compression, infusing her designs with a provocative sensibility. By bringing historical undergarments such as the corset and bustle to the outside, Westwood both exposed and satirised the artifice of femininity, transforming it into a form of sexual agency.

Over the course of their careers, Westwood and Kawakubo have each harnessed fashion as a tool for questioning convention and expressing their own values or political concerns.

For Westwood, this became especially pronounced from 2005 onwards, when her collections and runway presentations became inseparable from her activism. She campaigned fiercely for humanitarian and ecological causes, and her garments often featured painted and printed slogans and graphics, reviving the agitprop of her early punk years.

Kawakubo’s work is similarly charged with ideas of freedom and revolution. While she remains resistant to explaining the ‘meaning’ of her collections, she has in recent years issued written statements intimating their themes. These statements reveal many collections are a creative expression of her response to broader global issues and the state of humanity.

Together, Westwood’s and Kawakubo’s legacies are defined by creative courage, technical mastery and an unyielding belief in fashion as an agent for change. Their designs continue to inform contemporary approaches to fashion and inspire the pursuit of artistic and ideological freedom.

Columbine, corset top and mini-crini is a key work from Vivienne Westwood’s Voyage to Cythera collection, autumn–winter 1989–90. Recently donated to the National Gallery of Victoria by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM & Family, this work makes its debut in the Westwood I Kawakubo exhibition.

Westwood’s five collections between 1988 and 1990 have been deemed her ‘Britain Must Go Pagan’ era due to their mix of antiquity, history with modernity, fusing English tailoring traditions and Greek mythology.

Voyage to Cythera takes its name from Jean-Antoine Watteau’s 1717 painting The embarkation for Cythera. In Greek mythology, Cythera is the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The collection also drew on Watteau’s many depictions of characters associated with the Italian commedia dell’arte, a theatrical form popular in the eighteenth century. Among its familiar figures are Columbine and Harlequin, who navigate themes of courtship and love, with the witty Harlequin typically winning the heart of the flirtatious servant girl Columbine.

Westwood’s runway presentation literally reimagined the eighteenth-century painting: models stepped onto the catwalk through a giant gilt frame, as if emerging from the artwork itself. Columbine, with its distinctive diamond pattern, was worn by Westwood’s favourite model of the era, Sara Stockbridge. In the runway images, we see Susie Bick (now Cave) dressed as Harlequin and Stockbridge embracing at the show’s finale.

Reflecting on this time, Cave described Stockbridge as ‘the greatest girl ever to walk the earth. I was in love with her, awed by her. I often played the man when we went out together – she was so utterly feminine and beautiful’.

The work also brings together two of Westwood signature designs: the corset and the mini-crini. Drawing on historical silhouettes, she exaggerated their proportions to create garments that expressed a self-determined feminine agency.

Other models walked the runway in flesh-coloured leggings and bodysuits, some adorned with a single, strategically placed fig leaf. The looks emulated both the idealised nudity of classical Greek statues and the tight-fitting breeches of nineteenth-century menswear. Westwood revelled in challenging the status quo and often used nudity and its charged associations to mock lingering prudish attitudes toward the body. She later admitted, ‘It’s very difficult to come up with something shocking and original … I surprised myself by making a garment that shocked me.’

In the lead up to the Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition, Rei Kawakubo (1942–) generously donated forty-five works to the NGV’s fashion and textiles collection, thirty-seven of which appear in the display. Together, the group represents the last decade of Kawakubo’s practice, from 2015–2025, a period which has seen her focus on the creation of complex sculptural and abstract forms.

These are works that are conceived for the runway as the purest expression of Kawakubo’s ideas and, like haute couture, are not intended for retail sale. The works highlight Kawakubo’s innovative patternmaking techniques, approach to colour and materials, and her disregard of function in clothing. It includes collections that communicate key themes in her practice such as the relationship between two and three dimensions, the use of black and red and experimental design methods. Importantly, they also bring the NGV’s holdings up to date, extending from her Paris runway debut in 1981 to her spring–summer 2025 collection Uncertain Future. Together, the collections highlight Kawakubo’s aesthetic sensibility and the design innovations that have seen her redefine what clothing can be.

One of Kawakubo’s key propositions is the pursuit of a different mode of dressing that collapses the boundaries between body and garment or reconfigures them entirely. Since 2013, this has materialised as abstracted forms and sculptural garments.

One of the key collections in the gift is Invisible Clothes, spring–summer 2017. United by their dark palette and non-functional silhouettes, the works defy our expectations of what a garment is or should be. At the time, Kawakubo described the presentation as the ‘purest and most extreme version of Comme des Garçons’. Works such as Look 11, reveal Kawakubo’s constant search to subvert the parameters of dress.

Another important collection that features in the gift are three works from Blood and Roses, 2015. The all-red collection combined visceral textures, materiality, technique, form and scale: some works echo punk aesthetics, while others are highly poetic or sculptural. Look 1 echoed the collection title and featured recurring motifs in Kawakubo’s work: flowers (or rosettes) and the colour red. This rich vermillion first appeared in her collections in 1988 and is associated in Japan with Shinto shrines and the ink pads used for ivory signature seals. For Kawakubo, the collection expressed ‘a deeper significance of roses, typically happy and pretty’. Instead exploring the rose’s historical associations with blood, wars, political conflict, religious strife and power.

Demonstrating Kawakubo’s interest in pattern making and construction are two works from her 2023 Return to the Source collection, in which she disrupts dress conventions through proportion and deconstructionism. She has become known for setting herself and her team technical challenges or restraints – for example, making without stitching or constructing entire garments from a single repeated pattern piece.

The most recent works represented are from the 2025 Uncertain Future collection. Reflecting the introspective nature of Kawakubo’s practice, the collection is shaped by her stated desire to look inwards for inspiration and meaning. Look 4 and Look 5 from this collection serve as an expression of the unknowns of the future, making them a fitting inclusion in the exhibition.

Takamasa Takahashi first encountered the work of Comme des Garçons in the mid 1970s. By the early 1980s, he was a convert, wearing women’s collections of Kawakubo’s genderless and unstructured styles on the streets of Tokyo. In 1986, Takahashi turned to collecting, and since 2005 has been an important donor of Comme des Garçons to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Fashion and Textiles collection.

When did you first encounter Rei Kawakubo, what attracted you to her practice?

I started paying close attention to Kawakubo from 1975, when she participated in the Tokyo Designers Collection. However, I had already been aware of the brand name which had frequently appeared in fashion magazines since the early 70s.

At that time, many of the designs at Comme des Garçons featured folklore-inspired elements. However, what particularly caught my attention was the original textiles Kawakubo developed specifically for the collections, especially her use of traditional Japanese methods of dyeing and weaving.

What was the first work you collected and why did you select that piece?

I purchased two dresses from the 1986 spring–summer collection which was titled Bias Cutting. One was a thin georgette dress with a monochrome print and folded back hem. It became like a balloon and swayed as you walked. The other one was a mermaid dress made of stretch material with a bolero top. As far as I remember, it was the very first dress done by Kawakubo where female body lines were emphasised. This was a huge surprise for me to see her work as somehow sexual.

Using a bias cut gives garments a natural flow to the body lines and a sense of lightness. I thought it was a significant shift from what we knew of Comme des Garçons then.

Of your works in the NGV Collection, do you have a favoured collection, work or period of Kawakubo’s practice?

I was fortunate enough to see three of the controversial collections which were 1982 autumn–winter, 1983 spring–summer and 1983 autumn–winter in Tokyo, so that I have a special attachment to them.

However, it’s been more than forty years since that time and Kawakubo’s creativity keeps evolving. Looking back on those years, the collection that remains most memorable is the 1992 Lilith collection. It was about liberation for women from social constraints and norms. Some of Kawakubo’s work reveals her intent from the appearance, while others challenge our intellectual capacity. In this collection, Kawakubo’s thoughts were manifested through pattern making.

In more recent years, Adult Delinquent, 2010, and Crush, 2013, are particularly interesting and noteworthy. A few years ago, Kawakubo said in an interview that her intent was ‘to design without designing as much as possible’. I believe these two collections embody that concept in concrete form.

What has sustained your enduring collecting and interest in Comme des Garçons?

Perhaps I have to say it is Kawakubo as an individual rather than Comme des Garçons as a label which drives me to do so.

Over the past fifty years of observing her, she has steadfastly adhered to her convictions without wavering in the slightest. Every season, I find myself wondering what story she is going to tell us.

I believe no other designers have ever expanded the possibilities of clothes and fashion to such an extent as she has. She gives me endless excitement and anticipation about what is in her mind every season.

Do you have a preferred collection or work from your collection that features in the Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition?

Yes, it’s the ensemble that I call the ‘Lobster dress’ from the 2015 spring–summer collection titled Blood and Roses. The cape seems to symbolise the flowing of blood from the shoulders. When I saw it in the show video, I thought I had to have it.

We purchased it at the Dover Street Market in Ginza / Tokyo during a trip to Japan.

I have to say it was miraculous that we managed to get it, because show pieces are produced in extremely limited numbers and usually sold by orders.

A collector, hunter and gatherer of fashion over thirty-five years, Steven Philip’s diverse collection ranges from the early collections of Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, through the Japanese greats, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, to cult 80’s, street designers such as Leigh Bowery, Sue Clowes and Christopher Nemeth. In the lead up to the Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition, many iconic examples were purchased from Steven’s collection for the NGV’s fashion holdings.

When did you first encounter Vivenne Westwood, what attracted you to her practice?

My first encounter with the designs of Westwood and McLaren was through early i-D magazines. I remember looking at the street style in London, the music, politics – it was a London movement. I had to be part of it!

What was the first work you collected and why did you select that piece?

The first Westwood piece I bought was a red and white autumn–winter 1981–82 Pirate collection squiggle sash. I purchased it from Worlds End – I wasn’t living in London at the time, I made the trip specifically from Dundee!

I had to have a piece of the iconic squiggle – everyone that was anyone was wearing it.

It was one of the most versatile things I have ever owned: round the waist, shoulder, scarf or even a headpiece! Westwood’s pieces were never season specific, throw it on any time and it’s never dated!

I guess the first Westwood piece I ever truly ‘collected’ was when I moved to London a year or so before I started my stall on Portobello, I purchased a spring–summer 1985 Mini-Crini collection star jacket and orb denim jeans. I wore it to death but always held onto it, knowing one day it would be special.

Of your works in the NGV Collection, do you have a favoured collection or work and in the Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition?

It has to be the spring–summer 1983 Punkature ensemble. There was nothing like it at the time, you can’t imagine the looks you got going up the King’s Road wearing a few pieces from the collection!

It was so different to anything anyone was doing. It was grunge before grunge, how many designers these days do you see creating perfectly positioned ripped jeans or purposely stained prints? Westwood started this ball rolling and there was no going back!

What has sustained your enduring collecting and interest in Vivienne Westwood?

I think it was the stories! Westwood was an incredible storyteller dissecting and merging subcultures and class systems at her whim.

What strikes me more than anything is that she never followed any trends, when everyone went flat she went high. In the 90s when it was minimal she went maximalist. If society zigged, she zagged.

She believed in what she was doing and there was always a political edge. She was the originator of so many now commonly used design tropes and I don’t believe she will ever be replaced.

Australian-born photographer Robyn Beeche (1945–2015) is renowned for her documentation of 1970s and 1980s London, capturing the emergence of post-punk and New Romantic fashion, art and music. Among her best-known works are the photographs she took documenting the early runways of Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood.

Beeche first took up photography after returning to Sydney in 1967 following a two-and-a-half-year stint in London. Working at an advertising agency, she was introduced to photographer Grant Mudford, whose influence inspired her to experiment with the medium. She became increasing fascinated with fashion photography, particularly the work of Sarah Moon, Hans Feurer and Harri Peccinotti.

Determined to pursue photography as a career, she returned to London in 1974, boldly turning up on Peccinotti’s doorstep to ask for work. In time, Peccinotti became a mentor and close friend. When he relocated to Paris in 1977, Beeche established her own studio and began covering the London and Paris runways of designers such as Thierry Mugler, Chloé, Claude Montana and Karl Lagerfeld. Fashion impresario Percy Savage (1926–2008) was another key figure in Beeche’s early career. He not only featured many of her images in his magazine The London Collections but introduced her to her long-time partner Michael Duffy, then Savage’s personal assistant.

Honing her craft, Beeche later became known for her pioneering explorations of body art and physical transformation. Shot in 1979, an editorial for Now! magazine featuring model Vivienne Lynn became instrumental in the formation of the New Romantic aesthetic, typified by theatrical makeup and an amalgamation of glam-rock and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century romantic period aesthetics.

She went on to collaborate with the likes of Zandra Rhodes, Vivienne Westwood, Leigh Bowery and Divine, working closely with Richard Sharrah, Richard Sharples and Phyllis Cohen to explore surrealist makeup and optical illusion and the body as a site of artistic inquiry – well before the advent of Adobe Photoshop.

Beeche first worked with Vivienne Westwood in 1981, documenting the designer’s first runway collection presentation, Pirate at London’s Pillar Hall. She also shot the collection in her studio, where models donned purple and orange make-up, gold foil on their teeth and posed with the newly released Sony Walkman.

Not only did Beeche photograph the London fashion scene on the runway but also backstage at club openings. In 1982, she shot Westwood and McLaren’s Savage and Nostalgia of Mud collections, the latter coinciding with the launch of their second store on St Christopher’s Place, not far from Selfridge’s in Oxford Street. Her intentionally grainy images of the theatrical shopfront show the models wearing key outfits from the collection.

By the mid 1980s, Beeche had garnered international recognition, with her photographs appearing in major fashion magazines such as 19, Interview and Observer.

During the 1980s Beeche captured the essence of Westwood’s dynamic – and often playfully chaotic – runways. As seen in images of her Time Machine (1988) and Voyage to Cythera (1989) collection presentations, Westwood sent multiple models down the runway at once, encouraging them to embody characters, dance and interact, defying the formal convention of one model walking the runway at time.

The last of Westwood’s collections to be shot by Beeche was Cut, slash & pull, spring–summer 1991. In her image of model Susie Bick wearing the Sunwheel dress, Beeche captures the movement and volume of the sheer white fabric. Encouraged to be performative and playful, Cave recalls ‘[Westwood’s] shows were pure anarchy – sweet, thrilling chaos. Being part of them, so early in my career, transformed me, gave me a voice. She was the ship’s captain, our supreme leader, and we were her godless figureheads dressed in scandalous clothing.’

Throughout her career, Beeche remained committed to exploring photography as a tool of conceptual and aesthetic transformation, rather than mere commercial documentation. This same fascination would later underpin her shift toward photographing India’s spiritual rituals. Settling there permanently in 1992, Beeche continued to explore themes of transformation – now articulated through the intersection of devotion, community and ritual spectacle.

NGV Magazine: Visitors to Westwood | Kawakubo will encounter an immersive archival display illuminating the careers of both designers. Tell us how this project came about and what visitors can expect?’

Charlotte Botica (CB): Our aim for the Westwood | Kawakubo timeline and archive was to provide rich contextual and scene-setting to allow audiences to become acquainted with the lives, personalities and creative practices of Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Upon entering, a video presentation of footage that captures 1970s–90s in London and Tokyo is interspersed with early runway presentations and television coverage of the designers. The accompanying soundtrack features reflections from fashion journalist Suzy Menkes and fellow designers Rick Owens, Bella Freud and Pharrell Williams on the influence and impact Kawakubo and Westwood have had on them and the fashion industry at large. It was also important for us to foreground Westwood and Kawakubo’s own perspectives: visitors will be able to read large quotes from each designer that reveal their views on fashion and creativity.

In the second part of the timeline, a selection of imagery, archival materials and footage documents important moments in their respective careers, in the context of broader social and cultural movements. For Westwood, examples of these iconic moments include the first issue of Deluxe magazine from 1977, which features an editorial for her shop Seditionaries; a photograph of Naomi Campbell tumbling on the runway in 9-inch platform heels during the 1993 Anglomania collection presentation; and the original pattern pieces for the crown designed by milliner Stephen Jones for the 1987 Harris Tweed collection. For Kawakubo, we show a rare early press book for her 1986 Bonding collection, photographed by Steven Meisel; footage of the costumes based on her seminal 1996 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body she designed for American choreographer Merce Cunningham’s Scenario; and a campaign poster photographed by Cindy Sherman for the 1994 Eccentric collection.

NGV: You found so much rich material to work with. Where did you start when conceiving the display?

Meg Slater (MS): Both Westwood and Kawakubo were born in the 1940s and established their careers as fashion designers in the 1970s. When you have more than eighty very rich years of life to represent, it is important to establish three things: key moments, the level of detail, and points of synergy between the designers. To determine the key moments in the designers’ lives and careers, we found it best to cast the net wide and then refine. We started the research process by collating a comprehensive timeline of key events for each designer – from the years they attended university and the years seminal collections were presented to the years they received prestigious awards. From there, we closely reviewed and isolated the key moments to represent and determined how they should be represented (through written text, photography, video or archival materials).

We also established early on that it would be useful to contextualise these moments in each designer’s career by referencing broader social and cultural developments. These range from the lasting impact of WWII in Japan and the UK (where Kawakubo and Westwood where raised, respectively) and the advent of online shopping, to the cultural impact of figures like Diana, Princess of Wales and model Naomi Campbell in and beyond the fashion world. During the research process, several points of synergy between the designers were revealed, and we have integrated a selection of these moments throughout the timeline. An early example is Kawakubo (accompanied by fellow fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto) visiting Westwood’s King’s Road store in the 1970s. More recently, both designers published creative manifestos just six years apart (Westwood published her Active Resistance to Propaganda manifesto in 2007, and Kawakubo published her manifesto in a 2013 issue of System magazine). Each manifesto sets out the focus and aims of their creatively and socially motivated practices in the years to come. Finally, and from a more practical perspective, we worked closely with NGV graphic and exhibition design teams to develop a timeline that met the spatial requirements of the exhibition space.

NGV: Can you take us through your research process? How did you find information, sources and material?

CB: Instead of creating a text-only timeline, we gathered a range of materials, spanning images, sound, performance and publishing, to create an immersive environment evoking the look and feel of the times in which the designers were working. Once we had compiled a comprehensive understanding of Westwood and Kawakubo, we then determined the digestible volume of information for inclusion. For the video wall we accessed archival footage that captured the cultural Zeitgeist of 1970s Tokyo and London, respectively. These snapshots reveal the street styles and popular fashions during the designers’ early careers. For example, footage of white-collar workers exiting London’s Piccadilly Circus train station is juxtaposed with footage of punks and teddy boys parading the streets around London.

In the second part of the timeline, audiences are presented with materials produced by the fashion houses and which are now housed in the NGV Archive. Copies of magazines such as i-D, Purple and The Face highlight the significance of publications before the rise of digital and social media marketing, so it was essential to include these materials. Such publications, particularly in the 1980s–90s, were at the forefront of showcasing emerging and independent fashion. A few items also came from eBay, such as the publication from the year 2000 dedicated to Kawakubo’s Harvard University Excellence in Design Award and a Vivienne Westwood Climate Revolution T-shirt from c. 2012–13 with graphic messaging pertaining to the climate crisis. Items like these add great texture to the timeline.

NGV: What role have advertising and publishing played in the designers’ practice?

CB: For Kawakubo, publishing and advertising are an extension of Comme des Garçons’ brand identity and her broader creative practice. She sees no hierarchy in the brand’s outputs. From the beginning she worked with key photographers on largely black and white press books and editorial images. From 1988 to 1991, Comme des Garçons published Six magazine, an eight-issue experimental magazine comprising new and archival photography, images of interiors and architecture, and work by contemporary artists. Issues rarely featured Comme des Garçons collections but were a sensory and visually arresting experience. The editorial team was composed of Kawakubo, editor Atsuko Kozasu and artistic director Tsuguya Inoue, who said of Six: ‘This is our world. We think it’s beautiful. Join us if you feel the same way.’ In the timeline we feature the first issue, published in 1988, which includes contemporary artworks by Gilbert and George and André Kertész and articles on pioneering Irish designer Eileen Gray and French avant-garde artist, director and writer Jean Cocteau. A video screen reveals the contents of the sixth issue, released in 1990, flipping through the pages to show an editorial spread shot in Tbilisi, Georgia, inspired by painter Niko Pirosmani, featuring locals wearing a mixture of Comme des Garcons clothing and Georgian traditional dress.

We also highlight a copy of System magazine from October 2013 featuring the manifesto that Kawakubo released to coincide with the presentation of her spring–summer 2014 collection, Not Making Clothing, which marked a shift in her practice towards increasingly abstract designs. ‘I tried to look at everything in a different way,’ Kawakubo states in her manifesto. ‘I thought a way to do this was to start out with the intention of not even trying to make clothes.’

MS: Publishing and advertising have played a similarly significant, albeit quite different, role in representing Westwood and her brand. Beyond the name of her eponymous brand, Westwood embedded her image and her values into everything she made. From her earliest collaborations with Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, through to her final collections before her passing in 2022, she remained at the forefront, whether on the cover of a magazine or walking the runway alongside models and friends wearing her designs. Despite Westwood’s front-facing presence in her brand’s operations and output, it is important to acknowledge shifts in her approach to communicating her vision and values.

Westwood’s imaging of her brand in the final decades of the twentieth century is characterised by her bold, often humorous integration of the source material that inspired her designs. A key example is the invitation to the runway presentation of her 1993 Anglomania collection, which will be on display in the timeline. For the invite, she appropriated a sixteenth-century depiction of Queen Elizabeth I by placing a gold safety pin through the monarch’s lip. This aptly captured Westwood’s celebration and subversion of English fashion and cultural history in the looks that comprised the collection. This lightness is also represented in the campaigns and promotional materials centring British model Sarah Stockbridge, who first became Westwood’s muse for her 1987 Harris Tweed collection. Westwood saw Stockbridge as the embodiment the classic ‘English rose’ archetype, but with a modern twist – as embodied in the celebrated cover for the fiftieth anniversary of i-D Magazine, also included in this timeline.

By contrast, in the 2000s, Westwood’s brand and her public image underwent significant transformation, and Westwood began to occupy a new, expanded space in popular culture. This can be attributed to many factors, from the rise of online marketing to celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Pamela Anderson wearing Westwood’s designs. Throughout this period of change, Westwood always voiced her complicated feelings about the space she occupied within the fashion industry. She shared her struggles reconciling her values and politics with the brand’s rapid growth amid a mounting climate crisis. She regularly articulated her concerns and hopes for change within her industry, most notably in her Active Resistance to Propaganda manifesto, published in 2007, a copy of which will be on display in the timeline. Beyond this text, she began to harness every opportunity – from collection titles and runway presentations to manufacturing methods – to more closely align her output with her ethics.

NGV: What does this kind of archival presentation add to an exhibition like Westwood | Kawakubo, and to archives in art museums more broadly?

MS: I think archival displays can play a crucial role in contextualising and making accessible the life and practice of a creative person. The NGV, like all public institutions, welcomes a diverse audience, so it is important to provide multiple levels of entry into a subject. This might be through the artworks or designs themselves, the wall texts accompanying them, as well as talks and tours, workshops, or additional layers of archival information that help to situate audiences in a time and place.

Galleries and museums can be intimidating, especially if you feel there is certain level of knowledge required to appreciate an exhibition or collection display. We kept this front of mind when developing the timeline in this exhibition, and it is part of the reason why we applied a broader lens to our subjects. Rather than simply recounting the career milestones of Westwood and Kawakubo, we contextualised the development of their practices as designers, in and beyond the fashion world. For example, to represent the conditions that led Westwood and Kawakubo to pursue fashion design, we firstly describe and illustrate post-WWII society in Japan and the UK, the emergence of countercultural movements including feminism and gay rights, and other major historical developments that shaped the fashion industry of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the twenty-first century, fashion undergoes significant changes amid the rise of online shopping and the advent of fast fashion. Both Westwood and Kawakubo rebel against many of these dominant trends by exploring alternative design methodologies, modes of production, promotion and retail. Without representing these broader sociocultural shifts, the significance and impact of the unconventional ways of working that have established Westwood and Kawakubo as fashion visionaries would not be clear. Further, these developments are more widely known and experienced by exhibition visitors and can provide a point of entry into a more specific subject.

NGV: Did you find any surprises or new discoveries along the way?

MS: Prior to working on this project, I was aware of Kawakubo’s collaborations with artists, but I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of her engagement with art history. It is a throughline that connects the many arms of Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo has crafted collections referencing mythological figures like Lilith (Adam’s first wife, who in Jewish folklore, was banished from Eden for refusing to ‘lie beneath’ him) and the avant-garde practice of twentieth-century queer French artist and writer Claude Cahun.

Since opening her first store in the Minami-Aoyama district of Tokyo in 1976, which did not have any mirrors or window displays, Kawakubo has prioritised creating unique, alternative retail models and environments. This has often been achieved through collaborations with leading architects and artists, which has seen the constant reimagining of Comme des Garçons stores across the globe. This innovation is also reflected in the unconventional promotional materials produced to support Kawakubo’s collections, which are printed and often comprise source imagery spanning many disciplines, from photographs by Peter Lindbergh to sculptures by Ai Weiwei.

In the exhibition timeline, we have taken the opportunity to spotlight some of the interdisciplinary artistic collaborations undertaken by Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. We are thrilled to include examples of Kawakubo’s collaborations with renowned artists like photographer Cindy Sherman and choreographer Merce Cunningham. I am also excited for visitors to see lesser-known items like the experimental program Kawakubo produced with Raw Vision, a journal dedicated to outsider art, to accompany Comme des Garçons’ MONSTER collection, autumn-winter 2014.

CB: Audiences might be surprised by Kawakubo’s association with celebrities and artists, with past Comme des Garçons campaigns featuring the likes of actors John Malkovich and Sandra Bernhard. In 1986 the New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat walked for the menswear line Comme des Garçons Homme – the timeline features footage of Basquiat walking the runway wearing a grey double-breasted suit. Another moment to keep an eye out for is a postage stamp featuring an outfit from Vivienne Westwood’s’ 1993 Anglomania collection, released in 2012 for the Royal Mail’s Great British Fashion Stamp series. The stamp is a reminder of Westwood’s enduring influence and impact on the fashion industry, as someone who was once an outsider, provocateur and disrupter became part of the establishment.