WESTWOOD | KAWAKUBO X NGV

‘This exhibition celebrates two leading female fashion designers from different cultural backgrounds, who both had strong creative spirits and pushed boundaries. Through nearly 150 designs from the NGV Collection and key international loans, Westwood | Kawakubo invites audiences to reflect on the enduring legacies of these groundbreaking designers and contemplate the ways in which fashion can be a vehicle for self-expression and freedom.

– Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV

“The exhibition explores Westwood and Kawakubo’s practices across five themes. Punk and Provocation considers how punk, both aesthetically and conceptually, crystallized in the early collections of each designer and has remained a touchstone, if not a design manifesto, throughout their careers. Highlight Westwood works in this section convey some of the key aspects of punk style – offensive graphics, bondage trousers, distressed knitwear, tartan, leather, safety pins and chains. In dialogue, four notable works by Kawakubo demonstrate the influence and ethos of punk in her practice.

Rupture explores the unique design lexicons of Westwood and Kawakubo, revealing how each have been driven by the desire to break free of convention and reinvent the rules of dress. Early highlights here include displays of Westwood’s Pirate (spring-summer 1981) and Nostalgia of Mud (autumn-winter 1983) collections that encapsulated the New Romantic and Buffalo movements of 1980s London, contrasted by recent works from Kawakubo’s ‘wearable objects’ series Not Making Clothes collection, spring-summer 2014, and her Neo Future, spring-summer 2020 which saw her question the boundaries between body and garment.

Reinvention looks at the way both designers have referenced the past or looked to the future, looking to sources of inspiration that include fashion history, tailoring traditions, decorative arts and textiles. For Westwood art history has been a constant influence, most notably in her Portrait collection (autumn-winter 1990), which featured prints of famous eighteenth-century paintings by Boucher and Fragonard emblazoned on the corsetry. For Kawakubo, breaking the rules of taste has resulted in collections that bring together clashing pattern, ruffles and frills.

The Body: Freedom and Restraint explores the ways in which both Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo have consistently challenged existing conventions related to ideal and idealized female bodies and rallied against objectification. Beginning with iconic works from Westwood’s Erotic Zones collection (spring-summer 1995) and Kawakubo’s The Future of Silhouette (autumn-winter 2017-18), this section considers the ways in which both designers have redrawn the female body.

The final section of the exhibition, The Power of Clothes, considers fashion as a tool to convey a message, personal or political. It concludes with recent Westwood collections – Propaganda (autumn-winter 2025) and Chaos Point (autumn-winter 2008-09) – that utilize clothing as a canvas for messaging about the environment, social inequity or political freedoms in an echo of her early punk days. These are seen in context with the self-reflective power of one of Kawakubo’s recent and most poignant collections (Uncertain Future, spring-summer 2025). Here printed imagery alludes to global concerns and issues of individual and collective power and powerlessness.”

– NGV

Watch the exhibition video here!

On view:

07.12.2025 – 19.04.2026

NGV International

180 St Kilda Rd

Melbourne VIC 3006 – Australia

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• Photos © Courtesy of Pr
• Video © Courtesy of Pr
• All further images as credited in photo captions.