Celebrating the opening of Westwood | Kawakubo, NGV curators host conversations with visiting international guest speakers to examine the work of two of the most influential fashion designers in recent history, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, and the sometimes surprising connections between the two.
Full schedule of topics and speakers to be announced.
Bringing together works from the NGV Collection with selected important loans from international museums and private collections, audiences will have the opportunity explore a showstopping display of more than 140 innovative and ground breaking designs by two global icons of the fashion world, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo.
Beginning their careers in the 1970s working in different countries and cultural contexts, British-born Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo (b.1942), introduced a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion by subverting the status quo. Structuring themes of the exhibition, Punk and Provocation, Rupture, Reinvention and The Body and The Power of Clothes, each considering different ways in which Westwood and Kawakubo have rewritten fashion convention over the course of their careers.