The sculptural clothes of enigmatic Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo are the subject of this year's spring exhibition organised by the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between is the museum's first monographic exhibition on a living designer since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.

It includes over 150 garments ? designed between the 1980s and now ? that demonstrate her avant-garde ideas, her attitude towards fashion as an extension of the body, and her impact on the industry.
"Season after season, collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body," said curator Andrew Bolton.

"Her fashions not only stand apart from the genealogy of clothing but also resist definition and confound interpretation." The exhibition is spilt into nine themes that each examine a duality found in Kawakubo's designs, which lie somewhere between art and clothing.

They are titled Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Antifashion, Model/Multiple, High/Low, Then/Now, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes, some of which are also divided into a number of sub-categories.
Sections include examples of Kawakubo's interpretations of the Japanese concept of "kawaii" ? or cuteness ? her blurring of clothes for weddings and funerals, and fusion of conventionally male and female apparel.

The garments, many of whi...