‘Westwood Kawakubo’: a radical fashion exhibition rewriting the rules

A landmark fashion exhibition lands at the NGV from December 7th, 2025, to April 19th, 2026, bringing Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo into a rare and electrifying dialogue. Positioned as two of the most influential designers of the last half-century, Westwood Kawakubo presents more than 140 works that trace how these self-taught visionaries reshaped aesthetics, challenged norms, and redefined the language of dress. For visitors, the show offers a rich exploration of fashion history—one rooted in rebellion, innovation, and an enduring fascination with the possibilities of the body and clothes.

Punk fashion history reimagined

The exhibition opens with the era that ignited their revolutions. In the mid-1970s, Westwood injected the raw, confrontational energy of punk into fashion, creating clothing that doubled as protest: tartan bondage looks, ripped fabrics and charged graphics from her iconic stores SEX and Seditionaries.

A decade later, Kawakubo articulated her own radical break, insisting she would “start from zero” and pursue what had never been done before. Asymmetry, distressed textures, and voluminous black silhouettes disrupted Western fashion conventions and announced a new avant-garde.

The exhibition places these parallel provocations side by side, showing how each designer used fashion to challenge beauty standards and destabilise deeply ingrained ideals.

Rethinking the body and clothes

One of the show’s central themes is an examination of how Westwood and Kawakubo explored the relationship between the body and clothing. Kawakubo’s pioneering collections, such as Body Meets Dress–Dress Meets Body, distorted or flattened the silhouette, pushing garments into sculptural territory. Her more recent “wearable objects” abandon the concept of a conventional fit altogether, calling into question the very premise of clothing.

Westwood’s approach, equally subversive, used exaggeration and historical referencing to critique fashion’s expectations. By externalising corsets and bustles, she exposed the artifice of femininity while transforming it into a tool of empowerment.

Together, their works dismantle the standardized body, insisting instead on plurality, imagination and freedom.

Dialogues across decades of innovation

Spanning nearly five decades, Westwood Kawakubo highlights landmark collections where the designers’ visions most dramatically converged—and diverged. Each room traces their shared obsession with cutting techniques, fabric experimentation and unconventional construction.

The exhibition brings together garments from the NGV Collection alongside major international loans from the Met, the V&A, Palais Galliera and private archives. Highlights include:

• Westwood’s era-defining punk ensembles of the late 1970s
  
• The dramatic Pirate collections, presented by both designers in 1981
  
• Sculptural Comme des Garçons silhouettes worn by cultural icons such as Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Tracee Ellis Ross
  
• Westwood’s opulent historical reinterpretations, including her famed tartan ball gowns and runway-worn corseted dresses
  
• Key works from Kawakubo’s experimental 21st-century collections, from two-dimensional pattern cutting to extreme architectural forms
  

Archival photographs, films and runway footage enrich the display, illuminating their fiercely individual processes and unrelenting commitment to reinvention.

Creative courage speaking in two voices

Designed around a principle of symmetry—two parallel yet unmistakably distinct creative forces—the exhibition celebrates the power of fashion as cultural critique. Westwood’s activism and political messaging and Kawakubo’s conceptual provocations reveal how deeply both designers believed in fashion as a tool for change.

Westwood Kawakubo is ultimately a testament to two singular rebels who reshaped contemporary fashion by questioning everything—from taste and gender to beauty, structure and meaning. Their legacy continues to influence how designers think, how garments are made, and how audiences understand the transformative potential of dress.