On Monday May 1 fashion's elite turned out for the annual Met Gala, the event of the season for celebrities and designers lucky enough to be on the guest list. The Gala is the place to see and be seen and the gown or suit worn can make or break your style and image for years to come. Each year, the met gala has a theme and honors a designer who has had a profound impact on the fashion industry.
This year the theme was called "the art of the inbetween" and guests were encouraged to dress in outfits that reflected the work of Comme des Garcons designer Rei Kawakubo. The Japanese designer, who founded the brand in 1973, is only the second living designer to be honored with an exhibition at the Met Gala Costume Institute. In this Vogue interview with the Met's Costume Institute Director, Alex Bolton explained his choice saying, “Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past forty years, By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”
The designer's work has often been cited as innovative and anti-fashion over the years and her couture designs are characterized by large bulges and intentional wear and tear. She is also credited with making black an avante-garde fashion statement and it has been a popular color for her line over the years. She is notoriously reclusive as many artists are and, although her business was reported to have made over $220 million a year she has said she doesn't care if her clothes sell or not. That sentiment has become even more evident in her designs since her announcement that she was "done making clothes" in 2014.
Many guests chose to honor the theme and wear vintage Comme des Garcons pieces while others chose to make obvious statements with their looks in reference to the Comme des Garcons brand's history of challenging traditional fashion and social norms.
Guests with obviously avant-garde looks like Katy Perry and Rihanna were praised on the front page of fashion and celebrity publications everywhere Tuesday morning as best dressed of the night.
Even celebrities who weren't wearing CDG or custom designs but, who had obvious statement pieces and artistic themes to their looks like Kendall and Kylie Jenner or Jaden Smith were at the top of the list. While these celebrities definitely incorporated the themes of the brand on the red carpet other guests who opted for more traditionally beautiful designs like Mindy Kaling and Kim Kardashian were accused of being off-theme in some cases. However according to a Women's Wear Daily Twitter poll 44% of respondants voted for Kim Kardashian when asked who wore white best.
This divide isn't new to the fashion industry and the argument over "mainstream fashion" and designers who believe the purpose of fashion is to defy and innovate in an artistic way has been debated by many in the industry. Rei Kawakubo's designs took flight in a time of punk rebellion when the fashion industry began to acknowledge street style and cede some of the runway's authority to the anti-fashion crowd because of designers like Vivienne Westwood.Who wore white the best at the #MetGala 2017?— WWD (@wwd) May 2, 2017
Today the Met's exhibition opens against a backdrop of the competing forces of fast fashion and luxury industries where true craft and brand identity often get lost in the quest for the consumers' and even more so the media's increasingly fickle tastes.
The industry continues to discuss whether fashion is truly art or purely a business and when standing in a museum full of avant-garde designs with labels like object/subject and self/other it can seem hard to debate the former. However, the exhibition also included designs from the pre-2014 days of Comme des Garcons with pieces from collections where Rei Kawakubo explored themes like mixing Japanese tradition with Western dress. Rei Kawakubo herself was even quoted in 2015 as saying, "When fashion is driven by creation, I suppose it can be called an art form. But I have no concept of art in my work. Clothes are only completed when somebody actually wears them. If they were art, they could be more abstract. As long as something is new and has never been seen before, I don't mind if people call it art. Wear them if you dare. " in Interview Magazine.
"Fashion is art that we live in" is another relevant quote that comes to mind here and in this case I think the "live in" part is particularly important. Fashion is something that most people can't escape even if they vehemently detest the "traditional" industry. And in fact the Fashion vs. art juxtaposition is something that makes the industry uniquely able to serve consumers from all backgrounds. While making art and challenging cultural concepts requires constantly being new and revolutionary putting on an outfit every morning and using your income to buy pieces you like is a relatively simple and compulsory task for most people. And don't the choices we make about what clothes to wear, however simple, make a statement about our personalities or even just our feelings in that particular moment?
It has been said that for a work to be considered great art it must capture a time, a place, and a feeling, and a look at a Vogue cover from the 1960s or maybe even your mother's prom photo shows that a great outfit has all three. Fashion is a business, a multi-billion dollar business to be exact, having clothes is a necessity and, companies make money when people decide they need more clothes. But, people also have a need for expression and fashion offers the ability to express oneself in even the smallest way, sometimes subconsciously, which is perhaps the most important and authentic form of expression. Even those who lament the unimportance of fashion are making a statement in their own way while, for the majority that falls somewhere into ambiguity and vague curiosity the "art of the inbetween" can be found in the little everyday moments of inspiration that strike when we least expect it.
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