The NGV’s world-premiere summer blockbuster exhibition pairs two global icons of the fashion world for the first time, British designer Vivienne Westwood and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. As self-taught, independent practitioners, Westwood and Kawakubo’s affinity lies in their uncompromising originality anchored in a desire for personal freedom, autonomy, and social and aesthetic change.
Utilising analogue techniques that embrace an anarchic spirit, our campaign speaks to the unorthodoxy associated with Westwood and Kawakubo's approach to making. As self-taught designers, each interrogates the language of dressmaking in a search for novelty that reframes the meaning of clothing. Combined with their respective affinity with the punk spirit, our campaign rejects flattery in favour of rawness and beautiful imperfection.
As self-described punks, Westwood and Kawakubo established themselves as provocateurs with their earliest collections, challenging social and fashion norms and up-ending conventions of beauty and taste to expand the parameters of fashion. Born a year apart in different countries and cultural contexts, each brought a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion design that subverted the status quo.
Presented thematically, Westwood | Kawakubo charts the defining collections and concerns of their practices – from the mid-1970s to the present day – inviting audiences to consider the multiple ways that Westwood and Kawakubo have each rewritten fashion over the course of their careers. Alongside fashion, the exhibition also features archival materials, photography and runway footage, offering audiences a deep insight into the minds and creative processes of these two legends of contemporary fashion.
NGV Friday Nights operates as a strategic audience-development and engagement initiative for the Gallery, extending exhibition access beyond traditional hours in order to reframe the gallery as a social and cultural destination. Conceptualised as an extension of the same irreverent, boundary-pushing spirit that defined the broader campaign, our work for Friday nights was deliberately insurgent and atmospheric, capturing punk’s refusal of passivity and positioning the gallery as an active site of rebellion, experimentation and participation.
Westwood | Kawakubo was conceived as a cultural dialogue rather than a retrospective, positioning fashion as a site of provocation, politics and formal rebellion. Our work extended this ethos beyond the Gallery, translating punk irreverence and conceptual urgency into a broader experiential program that activated new audiences and reframed the exhibition as a living cultural moment.
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