Look 11, dress
2016 {Invisible Clothes collection, spring-summer 2017}
Medium
wool cotton nylon, polyester, cupra, and nylon and metal (fastening)
Measurements
139.0 cm (centre back) 33.0 cm (waist, flat)
Credit Line
Gift of the artist, 2025
Gallery location
Special Exhibitions Gallery
Ground Level, NGV International
About this work
Kawakubo’s Invisible Clothes collection featured enormous black dresses and obscuring three-dimensional forms. Challenged to describe it, fashion journalist Sarah Mower wondered whether the show’s true subject was ‘the invisibility of women, rather than clothes’. By defying expectations of what a garment should be and stripping away associations of desire or ‘sexual overkill’, Kawakubo proposes a different mode of embodiment, reminding us that beauty has no single,
fixed definition.