The Met's Comme des Garçons exhibition demonstrates how forward-thinking designers like Rei Kawakubo are using new digital crafts to manipulate both the body and architectural space, says Aaron Betsky in his latest Opinion column.

There is a mix of architecture and fashion in the exhibition of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Not only is Kawakubo, who founded and runs the label Comme des Garçons, an architect of clothes, creating structures and shapes the body occupies as an independent entity, but she also designed the display.
A collection of compound curves carried out in white that plays call and response with the displays, the design is as idiosyncratic in its relation to what it houses as Kawakubo's clothes are by design. The exhibition reminded me of the ways in which fashion and architecture are increasingly becoming intertwined as they figure out how to make sense of the world in which they operate. This is not just a question of architecture becoming more fashion-oriented. Yes, it is becoming more ephemeral, image-oriented, and subject to the cycles of fashion, including its continual references to classic periods (classical, baroque, rococo, neo-classical) and its appropriation of previously outré form for use by the elite.
But, in addition, technology, craft, and fluidity of form are causing the opposition between things we wear and things that shelter us to dissolve in favour of structuring both i...