“I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design… by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm. And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion… imbalance… unfinished… elimination… and absence of intent.” Rei Kawakubo said.

The fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. In Kawakubo’s work, this in-between space is revealed as an aesthetic sensibility, establishing an unsettling zone of oscillating visual ambiguity that challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, on view from May 4 through September 4, is a thematic exhibition, rather than a traditional retrospective, and it is The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.

Sponsored by Condé Nast, the exhibition features approximately 140 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear designs for Comme des Garçons, dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection. Objects are organized into nine dominant and recurring aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo’s work: Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Anti- Fashion, Model/Multiple, High/Low, Then/Now, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/ Not Clothes.

“In blurring the art/fashion divide, Kawakubo asks us to think differently about clothing,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Met. “Curator Andrew Bolton explores work that often looks like sculpture in an exhibition that challenges our ideas about fashion’s role in contemporary culture.”

“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”