As far as I am aware, neither Vivienne Westwood nor Rei Kawakubo ever set foot in Australia’s self-anointed “cultural capital,” yet both feel distinctly at home within the city’s visual vocabulary. In Melbourne, Westwood and especially Kawakubo’s label Comme des Garçons is a uniform of chic subversion that pairs well with the shadows of the city’s seedy elegance. It is a uniform worn by a cluster of faithful disciples, who believe the sterling quality of their identity resides in their Westwood pearls or a sun-faded Comme blazer. These are the designers who sheath the malnourished backs of the brutally cool—and, often, the coolly brutal—Melbournian. Then again, this may say less about the city than about the loathsome circles I move in.

Another instalment of the reliably divisive Summer Spectaculars at the National Gallery of Victoria has arrived. This year, a fashion exhibition, Westwood | Kawakubo. Since her death in 2022, the life of British designer Vivienne Westwood seems ready-made for the glow of posterity and retrospection. But this exhibition refuses to settle into easy commemoration. Westwood doesn’t stand alone and is paired with the founder of Japanese label Comme des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo, where in the darkened halls and pulsing rooms of the gallery, a dialogue, at times harmonious, at times awkward, occurs between two designers for whom provocation was their greatest success and their undying torment.

Westwood | Kawakubo is an international, landmark exhibition in every sense of the word—and the NGV won’t have you forget it. This is the first show to position the two designers together. Undoubtedly, the subject matter and sheer breadth of work on display mark it as an original offering, and a welcome shift away from the “plastic-fantastic” theme-park feel of last summer’s Kusama. On paper, it promises provocation. What is revealed instead, and perhaps unintentionally, is something of a warning about the politics of garments and identity. Though provocation is fleeting, rebellion is seemingly eternal—so long as one is well-dressed.

The exhibition is laid out in five thematic zones: punk and provocation, rupture, reinvention, the body, and the power of clothes. The first, “Punk and Provocation,” captures just that. But before the audience sees even a thread of clothing, the exhibition opens with a deluge of didactic information, words, and history. A small hallway with digital displays on the left is mirrored with a wall of quotes from the two designers on the right. “Freedom, rebellion, independence are my mottos,” reads one from Rei Kawakubo. This prelude appears to establish the show’s central narrative focus: both designers’ awareness of the reactive power of clothing. Is it laid on thickly?  Yes. For the first few rooms, the curation and overwrought written didactics seem only there to say to audiences, “this is a good idea, trust us.” But this prescriptive quality might be excused, as I imagine many will only be vaguely familiar with Westwood and the enigmatic Rei Kawakubo. Both were born a year apart, on opposite sides of the world. Both were self-taught designers. Both would become arbiters of otherworldly clothes.

Westwood came from a working-class family in Cheshire, trained as a teacher, and might have remained one if history had not intervened. Instead, after meeting her co-conspirator Malcolm McLaren—who later became the manager of the Sex Pistols—she began making clothes for a generation that understood style as a form of refusal. Conversely, Kawakubo’s beginnings were quieter and less defined by a public vision of rebellion, but, rather, a private impulse for disturbance. She was born into an intellectual household in Tokyo and studied art history at the university where her father taught. By 1969, she was already designing clothes that would form the basis for Comme des Garçons, a label predicated on a simple philosophy: fashion must always be questioned rather than merely worn. When words are replaced by clothes, the exhibition gets moving. After escaping the early spaces, the discursiveness, spunk and narrative central to this show acquit sheer spectacle for spectacle’s sake. In the hands of the NGV’s fashion curators, Katie Somerville and Danielle Whitfield, the curation of garments is never trite, and they carefully balance argument rather than ornament. 

In the first zone of the exhibition, “Punk and Provocation,” a simple connection is formed through consideration of a material continually used by both designers: tartan. A punkish menswear look from Westwood, which I can only describe as the garb of a butch guttersnipe, is composed of trousers in the MacAndreas tartan, signature to the Westwood house, complemented by a raffish blue harness. Alongside it is a Comme Des Garçons piece—Look 7, a boxy couture garment from 2017—in which the body seems to emerge from an exploded tartan schoolgirl skirt. Historically valued for the density of weave that warmed bodies in the bitter Scottish winters, tartan is an inherently communicative cloth. Its pattern encodes lineage and identity, whilst also allowing endless experimentation and distortion in its design. It is this quality that mirrors the very ambition of every great fashion designer, to evolve without losing what is distinctly their own. But positioning these outfits as the first in the exhibition is powerful. They are talismanic of the central codes of both designers in material, form, and value.

With quite brilliant curation, they immediately assert a structure of how to “read” the clothes of Westwood and Kawakubo, forcing visitors to dispense with the conservative notion that a person should wear their clothes, and never allow their clothes to wear them. Of course, this propriety is entirely what Westwood and Kawakubo denounced. Kawakubo is fundamentally invested in the abnegation of the body as a site of corporeal scrutiny. Look 7 is talismanic of this principle, transforming a simple tartan shift dress into something comedically torturous. It is as though the wearer were caught in a pillory fashioned from a picnic blanket. This impulse for scrutiny of the body and a parody of politeness continues through the show. Westwood’s vision was always predicated on the bastardisation of history.

Of the quotes plastered in the earlier hallway, one sticks in my mind: “I still adore what remains of the British tradition of clothes.” While both Westwood and Kawakubo rely on history, Westwood’s rebellion is rooted not in historical fact but in a narrativized and aestheticized memory of it. She famously claimed that the twentieth century was a mistake, a time devoid of artists and instead preoccupied with “smashing” and mindless destruction. Westwood was, perhaps paradoxically, a conservative fashion designer, interested more so in the eccentric, slightly roguish, nationalist idea of Britain.

This is visualised later in the exhibition, where a tableau of characters is positioned in an eighteenth-century gallery room of some imagined English country house. In this scene, the usual players of Westwood’s world appear. The lady of the manor, the bon-vivant, a tartan-clad piper, replete with a matted wool wrap and sporran. These “characters” from her 1993 Anglomania collection illustrate the designer’s process of stealing from the national consciousness of Britain and using it as a narrative fuel. Divorced from the rubble of Post-Thatcher poverty, the territory of Westwood’s imagination is a drunkenly romantic vision of Britain not as it exists, but as it is readily narrativised—pirates, petticoats, Jacobite plots, and cigarette-stained tweed.

If Westwood’s work is founded on a weird reverence for history, Kawakubo, by comparison, is not interested in the narrativisation of history, the present, or, for that matter, the future. This is not to say she never references the past; but she is driven by a distinct impulse for the circularity of meaning in history, compared to Westwood’s romantic gaze—the fond eye of a grandmother dreaming of a “better time” that is invariably gone. Her Autumn/Winter 2016 show, “The 18th Century Punk Exhibition,” utilised hand-printed silk from Lyon, rich floral brocades and curled wigs reminiscent of the eighteenth-century maccaroni. In Look 1 from the eighteenth-century haute-couture collection, panels of floral brocade are manipulated to form a walking bouquet of silk. The sumptuous depravity of this collection engages with a tradition of rebellion—the French Revolution, bodies on tumbrils and heads rolling into the mud. But, unlike Westwood, it is not celebratory and is comfortably removed from her mission of evoking historic charm. Instead, it relies on her position within the lineage of fashion to inform why such work is important—why clothing is central to revolution, and at times, the cause of it.

If the exhibition offered nothing else, people would still come to see Carrie Bradshaw’s offensively banal wedding dress designed by Westwood for the Sex and the City movie. Positioned in the final stages of the exhibition, the dress is centralised beneath receding ogival arches. For a moment, we might imagine ourselves slipping into the silk and taking Mr Big by the hand.

But when this reverie quickly fades, we are forced to confront the object itself. The dress is, in truth, quite tawdry and, gazing upon the frumpy article, one feels an almost incorrigible urge to die. Beyond the dress itself, the display of these pieces signifies the elevation of garments to a level of uncanny, almost spiritual worth, where, even after character or context is removed, they still harbour indiscriminate meaning. This is not because of any inherent communicative power, but rather the tangential relevance to things that used to matter. Now, soaked with the adoration of a dwindling moment, the dress exists as a lost weapon of the weary, cosmo-sipping martyr Carrie Bradshaw—the Joan of Arc of the post-sex world.

Beyond the appellation as provocateurs, the main takeaway from the exhibition is not the similarities between Westwood and Kawakubo, but rather the discordance in their own awareness of their role as fashion designers. Westwood’s conception of dressing to provoke, in that quasi-homogeneous way, means that today the clothes produced by the brand have become the Uniqlo of the faux-provocateurs: the uniform of the feckless. Westwood is the designer of choice for people with no personality who want to say, “You and I will never be the same.” For today’s generation, these are designers worn by those who not only delight in faux-provocation, but who are wilfully ignorant of just how mainstream this flavour of subversion has become. After all, a populist show at the NGV can only prove this point.

As aesthetic conservatism continues to reverberate in the realms of art, literature, fashion, and film, this tired form of agitation will ultimately fall back on history to indicate its importance. Westwood | Kawakubo is a success in that it demonstrates an important lesson: the sad thing about rebellion is that hindsight is always necessary for diminishing its power.