Vivienne Westwood meets Rei Kawakubo at the National Gallery of Victoria’s radical celebration of fashion’s favourite misfits 

For its end-of-year show, the National Gallery of Victoria – Australia’s oldest and most visited museum – is paying homage to two of the most influential designers in contemporary fashion history: the late Dame Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, the visionary behind Japan’s Comme des Garçons and the global retailer Dover Street Market.

The pairing of the Derbyshire-born Westwood and Tokyo-born Kawakubo is a coup for anyone interested in fashion, art or rule-breaking. These two designers came up under different circumstances and championed different aesthetics but shared similar values, including an appreciation for historical costume and a commitment to challenging societal standards of beauty.  

Westwood’s outlandishness, both in her designs and her appearance – she wore heavily layered looks and dyed her hair every colour of the rainbow – might not seem an obvious match with Kawakubo, best known for her all-black uniform and sleek bob haircut. But a closer look at their bodies of work reveals a spiritual synergy. “What’s interesting is that they’re both self-taught, which gave them a great sense of creative and artistic freedom in their approach to fashion,” says Danielle Whitfield, curator of the museum’s fashion and textiles department. “Their designs are about challenging the rules of dress as well as ideas about gender, beauty and the body.”

In 1981, Westwood was not driven by the ‘glamazon’ trends of the time. Armed only with books and a sewing machine, she taught herself traditional cutting, lining and patternmaking techniques to develop pirates’ trousers based on original methods from the 1700s. Similarly, Kawakubo’s debut show in Paris was dubbed “Pirates”, which featured loosely draped boxy silhouettes around the hips paired with a sneakily well-tailored and structured fit near the waistline and calves. “I never intended to start a revolution,” Kawakubo reflected later. “I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else’s.”

The Westwood | Kawakubo exhibition features more than 140 of the duo’s designs, sourced from the National Gallery’s own extensive collection as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Palais Galliera in Paris. Among the rare archival pieces are the Watteau evening gown worn by Linda Evangelista on Westwood’s 1996 spring/summer runway, and a jacket from Kawakubo’s Smaller is Stronger 2025 autumn/winter collection. You’ll also find film, runway footage and photography by the likes of Paolo Roversi and Ki Price – the latter worked with Vivienne Westwood to document her activism. 

“In one room, we focus on the 18th century. There, you can see all these sweeping taffeta gowns by Westwood, whereas Kawakubo takes an 18th-century-meets-punk-samurai direction with her works,” says Whitfield, who has spent two years planning the show and mining the museums archives. “The rooms aren’t only aesthetically driven but also offer an emotional experience.” 

“For our major summer shows, we follow a model of exhibition where we pair the work of two leading artists,” she adds. “We’ve looked at the works of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei (2015); then Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (2019). There was a real opportunity here to pair the work of two women and two fashion designers, which we hadn’t done before. Westwood and Kawakubo are two of the most visionary and influential designers in recent fashion history, whose work is really about rebellion and freedom.”