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
© Comme des Garçons
Gallery location
Not on display
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.
Artwork Details
Explore the collection
Coffee pot
GEORG JENSEN SØLVSMEDIE, Copenhagen (manufacturer); Henning KOPPEL (designer)
Anguish
August Friedrich Albrecht SCHENCK
Pietà
CHELSEA PORCELAIN FACTORY, London (manufacturer); Joseph WILLEMS (modeller)
(Anna Romana Wright reading by candlelight)
Joseph WRIGHT of Derby
Chair
Carlo BUGATTI
The skittle players
David TENIERS II
Horses bathing in the sea
Lucy KEMP-WELCH
The great wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika HOKUSAI
Ulysses and the Sirens
John William WATERHOUSE
A lion attacking a horse
George STUBBS
Portrait group: The singer Farinelli and friends
Jacopo AMIGONI
Dunstanburgh Castle, north-east coast of Northumberland, sunrise after a squally night
J. M. W. TURNER
Cabinet
W. H. ROCKE & CO., Melbourne (manufacturer); John MATHER (decorator)
Nude woman reading
Robert DELAUNAY
Frederick van Velthuysen and his wife, Josina
Thomas de KEYSER
Johann Friedrich Prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, plaque
VOLKSTEDT PORCELAIN FACTORY, Volkstedt (manufacturer)
Mother and child
Cornelis de VOS
Scaramouche and Columbine
MEISSEN PORCELAIN FACTORY, Meissen (manufacturer); Johann Joachim KÄNDLER (modeller)
Throne
Carlo BUGATTI
In praise of dialectics
René MAGRITTE
Gates of Venice (View of the Venetian lagoon with the Tower of Marghera)
Francesco GUARDI
Armchair, from the Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna
Otto WAGNER (designer); GEBRÜDER THONET, Vienna (manufacturer)
Wine glass
ENGLAND (manufacturer)
The finding of the True Cross
COLA dell'Amatrice
The thinker
Auguste RODIN
Self-portrait no. 9
Andy WARHOL
Big nude I
Helmut NEWTON
Forest and sun
Max ERNST
Milton, when a youth
Henry FUSELI
The second marriage
David HOCKNEY