Rei Kawakubo: For and Against Fashion

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is undoubtedly one of the world’s major fashion designers. In 2017 she was the second living designer ever to be given a retrospective at the renowned Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work has exerted an extraordinary influence over succeeding generations of designers and is a major point of reference for all those wishing to explore the place of fashion in contemporary culture.

The 14 essays in this collection, written by eminent fashion theorists from around the world, explore the relationship of Kawakubo’s work to art, philosophy and architecture, and reveal how Kawakubo’s creative output allows us to understand the very notion of fashion itself.

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of the Reader’s Guides to Deleuze and Guattari’s ’What is Philosophy?’ (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Borges’ Short Stories (Bloomsbury, 2010), and, with David Denny, co-editor of Lars von Trier’s Women (Bloomsbury, 2018).