Fashion as Uprising: Westwood | Kawakubo at NGV – A Couture Collision That Cuts Deeper.
- T
- Jul 1
- 4 min read
This summer, Melbourne becomes the stage for a long-overdue confrontation - not between adversaries, but between two forces who turned fashion into a subversive weapon and the body into both battlefield and canvas. Westwood | Kawakubo, opening 7 December 2025 at NGV International, is not simply a retrospective. It is a duel of ideologies, a rebellion in fabric, a couture clash for the disobedient soul.
One brandished safety pins like sabres; the other sculpted silence into seams. Westwood and Kawakubo, two architects of aesthetic mutiny, meet for the first time not on a runway, but in the halls of a major public institution. And how deliciously ironic: two of fashion’s most radical iconoclasts canonised within a museum’s white walls. Yet this exhibition isn’t tamed. It bites.
Tailored Resistance
Vivienne Westwood - mother of punk, provocateur, eco-warrior, and sartorial anarchist - weaponised corsets and draped empire-line silhouettes with a wink and a war cry. Rei Kawakubo, meanwhile, dismantled clothing altogether, treating the body not as a thing to flatter but to question. Where Westwood seduced and disrupted in tartan and tulle, Kawakubo abstracted, folding garments into philosophical paradoxes. Together, they represent the left and right lungs of fashion’s revolutionary breath.
If the haute couture establishment once demanded reverence, Westwood and Kawakubo offered ridicule and riddles. And the world followed. Designers imitated. Museums took notes. Critics reached for metaphors and still fell short.
This exhibition does more than pair two legends - it frames them as mirror opposites within the same ideological war. Westwood - provocative, performative, deeply British. Kawakubo - meditative, cerebral, unplaceable. Yet both channel fashion into rebellion: not just against aesthetics, but against conformity, patriarchy, consumerism, and even fashion itself.
A Fabric of Five Acts
The exhibition unfolds like a five-act opera, equal parts spectacle and manifesto.
In Punk and Provocation, Westwood’s bondage trousers square off against Kawakubo’s early deconstructions - rage versus restraint. Rupture dissects the dismantling of tradition.
Reinvention explores the dialogue between history and future, empire and abstraction. The
Body: Freedom and Restraint interrogates silhouette and its symbolic shackles. And The
Power of Clothes stages a final act where fashion does not flatter - it fights.
From Westwood’s climate-conscious activism to Kawakubo’s obsession with form and void, each garment is a gesture of refusal: of gender norms, of market logic, of the polite silence expected of women in design. This isn’t fashion to be consumed. It’s fashion that consumes you - forcing the viewer into a dialogue, or at least a gasp.
When the Catwalk Becomes Political Theatre
It’s easy to forget in today’s influencer-slick landscape that fashion was once dangerous - revolutionary in its ability to spark, offend, and confuse. This exhibition restores that charge. We see not mere clothing but cultural artefacts with teeth.
There’s Rihanna’s 2017 Met Gala Comme des Garçons ensemble - an explosive bloom of petal-like defiance. Nearby, Westwood’s infamous MacAndreas tartan gown glows with aristocratic mockery. Parker’s corseted Sex and the City gown holds court like a monarch unhinged. All of them bear witness to a time when fashion didn’t just say “look at me,” but “wake up.”
A Tale of Two Radicals
Born just a year apart - Westwood in 1941, Kawakubo in 1942 - these women carved divergent yet equally disruptive paths. One emerged from post-war England into punk’s Thatcherite rebellion; the other navigated post-war Japan’s aesthetics of void, discipline, and conceptual rigor. Each eschewed fashion’s dominant narratives: Westwood by parodying it, Kawakubo by vaporising it.
Yet the real thrill lies not in the biographical symmetry, but in their mutual refusal of fashion’s fundamental assumptions. For Westwood, clothes became protest signs. For Kawakubo, they became questions without answers. NGV’s curatorial choice to avoid a linear chronology is deliberate. This is not a timeline. It’s a topography of radicalism.
Museums, Markets, and Misbehaving Hems
What does it mean to canonise anti-establishment figures within an establishment like the NGV? It’s an unresolved paradox - one Westwood would likely exploit with performative mockery, and Kawakubo would meet with inscrutable silence. Yet perhaps there is power in this tension. After all, if museums are the temples of cultural memory, then let the altar be draped in gingham, latex and unfinished hems.
In a fashion era increasingly beholden to algorithm-friendly aesthetics and ‘quiet luxury’ dictated by venture-backed minimalism, this show is a thunderclap. It asks: what happened to friction? Where did the intellectual in fashion go? Why has rebellion been replaced with beige?
This exhibition is not for the faint of fabric. It’s for the misfits who remember when fashion could still scare your parents - or at least force a conversation.
Dress Like You Mean It
NGV International has conjured not a fashion show, but a séance: a space where garments haunt, provoke, and resist passive admiration. Whether you leave laughing, gasping, or unsettled, one thing is certain - your closet will never feel the same again.
So dress up. Bring your questions. Don’t expect answers. Just revel in the beautiful discomfort. Because as Westwood once implied and Kawakubo always insists - fashion that behaves is fashion that’s dead.
Westwood | Kawakubo7 December 2025 - 19 April 2026NGV International - Melbourne
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Words by AW.
Photos courtesy of NGV.
