Vivienne Westwood + Rei Kawakubo Show

Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria has put Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo in one exhibition, pairing two designers who remade late-20th-century fashion from opposite sides of the world. (ngv.vic.gov.au) The show, titled *Westwood | Kawakubo*, opened at NGV International in Melbourne on December 7, 2025, and is scheduled to run through April 19, 2026. The museum calls it a world-premiere pairing of Westwood, who died in 2022 at 81, and Kawakubo, the Comme des Garçons founder born in 1942. (ngv.vic.gov.au) NGV says the exhibition includes more than 140 garments and places the two designers in dialogue rather than in separate retrospectives. The museum’s education materials describe an immersive installation with large screens, mirrors, flashing lights and a loud soundtrack in parts of the show. (ngv.vic.gov.au) The pairing joins a British designer who emerged from London’s 1970s punk scene with a Japanese designer whose Paris debut in 1981 upended ideas of silhouette and beauty. NGV says both were self-taught and built careers by rejecting established rules of dress, gender and the relationship between body and garment. (ngv.vic.gov.au; metmuseum.org) Westwood’s museum legacy has often been framed through British culture, rebellion and historical dress. The Design Museum says her work traced four decades of Britain’s social and economic climate through a practice built on historical reference and individualism. (designmuseum.org) Kawakubo’s museum treatment has leaned more heavily on authorship and abstraction. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition presented about 140 Comme des Garçons womenswear looks and organized them around pairs such as “Fashion/Antifashion” and “Clothes/Not Clothes.” (metmuseum.org; metmuseum.org) Putting them together shifts the emphasis from national fashion histories to a shared argument about design as an authored practice. NGV says the exhibition explores the designers’ “contrasting and intersecting” sensibilities, with guided tours built around their subversive collections and their impact on fashion history. (ngv.vic.gov.au) The result is a museum show that treats Westwood and Kawakubo less as labels than as makers with distinct visual languages. In Melbourne, that argument now has a closing date: April 19, 2026. (ngv.vic.gov.au)