The Japanese designer, who founded the esteemed Comme des Garcons fashion house in 1969, is being honored at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exhibition featuring half a century of her creations.
It is the first monographic show at the museum's Costume Institute dedicated to a living designer since Yves Saint Laurent, the French legend who put women in trousers and tuxedo jackets, in 1983.
The exhibition "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between," which opens Thursday and runs through September 4, displays more than 140 designs spanning the early 1980s to today.
A svelte and graceful figure, Kawakubo on Monday was the honored guest and inspiration at the annual fashion gala held at the Met, wearing her signature blunt bangs and displaying her trademark sphinxlike reserve.
A woman of few words, the 74-year-old almost never gives interviews, and refuses to discuss the meaning of her work. She continued to keep her own counsel, even in the runup to the momentous exhibition.
Her creations, however, are as audacious as she is demure.
The designer's oft-quoted phrase, "for something to be beautiful, it doesn't have to be pretty," sums up her approach.
In the guide that accompanies the exhibition, she offers another perspective: "I work around the figure, but I am never limited by what the figure has to be."
"The history of fashion has yielded only a handful of designers who are not only masters at their at their work but who can also define or redefine the aesthetics of our time. And Rei is one of these," said Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Costume Institute.
"Season after season, collection after collection, she changes our eye while upending perceived notion of beauty," he added. "If anything her work makes the art versus fashion debate redundant."
