Tunic

Designer Rei Kawakubo Japanese

ca. 1992

Not on view

Since founding Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo has consistently defined and redefined the aesthetics of our time. Season after season, collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body. This knit tunic, manufactured under Comme des Garçons’ Tricot line, represents a continuation of Kawakubo’s early 1980s collections, which featured a predominantly black palette, outsize silhouettes, asymmetry, and unfinished details. Similar to those deliberately imperfect garments, the knit ground of this tunic has been covered in strands of twisted tapes and wool, fabricating the illusion of disintegration.

Artwork Details

Overview

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Title: Tunic
Design House: Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969)
Designer: Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942)
Date: ca. 1992
Culture: Japanese
Medium: wool, cotton, synthetic
Credit Line: Millia Davenport and Zipporah Fleisher Fund, 2014
Object Number: 2014.42
Curatorial Department: The Costume Institute

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