Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo to be the focus of a new exhibition in Australia

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, is bringing together British fashion legend Vivienne Westwood and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in a new fashion exhibition which will celebrate both designer’s “groundbreaking” work.

The exhibition, titled ‘Westwood | Kawakubo,’ will premiere on December 6, 2025, and run until April 19, 2026, and will feature more than 140 of the designer’s innovative designs, exploring “the convergences and divergences between these two self-taught rebels of the fashion world”.

This will include key loans from London’s V&A Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Palais Galliera, and the Vivienne Westwood archive, alongside more than 100 pieces of works from the NGV Collection. The exhibition features more than 80 works that have recently entered the NGV Collection, including nearly 40 works recently gifted to the NGV by Comme des Garçons, especially for this exhibition.

Tony Ellwood, director of the NGV, said in a statement: “This exhibition celebrates two leading female fashion designers from different cultural backgrounds, who both had strong creative spirits and pushed boundaries.

“Through more than 140 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.”

National Gallery of Victoria to host exhibition dedicated to Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo

The ‘Westwood | Kawakubo’ exhibition will mark the first time both fashion designers, who were born a year apart in different countries, will have their work shown side-by-side, even though both designers are celebrated globally for questioning conventions of taste, gender and beauty, as well as challenging the very form and function of clothing.

The NGV said the exhibition design will present the two distinct voices of Westwood and Kawakubo “as parallel yet fundamentally unique forces in fashion,” using symmetry as its cornerstone concept to showcase the designers “like left and right hands; symmetrical but not identical”.

The exhibition will be presented thematically, exploring Westwood and Kawakubo’s practices across five themes, from the mid-1970s to the present day, sharing the multiple ways that both designers have each rewritten fashion conventions and codes during their careers. The themes include ‘Punk and Provocation,’ exploring the impact and influence of the punk zeitgeist of the 1970s; ‘Rapture’ showcasing the unique design lexicons of Westwood and Kawakubo driven by the desire to break free of convention and reinvent the rules of dress; ‘Reinvention’ looking at the way both designers drew inspiration from historical fashion references; and ‘The Body: Freedom and Restraint’ exploring the designers experimental design methodologies and the interrogation of gender and the idealised body.

The final section of the exhibition, ‘The Power of Clothes,’ considers fashion as a tool to convey a message, personal or political, and the powerful individual female voice. It concludes with recent Westwood collections, including Propaganda (autumn/winter 2025) and Chaos Point (autumn/winter 2008-2009), which utilise clothing and fabrics as a canvas for messaging about the environment, social inequity of political freedoms in an echo of her early punk days. These are seen in context with the self-reflective power of Kawakubo’s recent collections, Uncertain Future, spring/summer 2025, which express her emotional response to the state of the world.

Alongside the fashion, the exhibition also features archival materials, photography, film and runway footage, designed to offer audiences a deep insight into the minds and creative processes of these two legends of contemporary fashion.

Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria to bring together Westwood and Kawakubo in new exhibition

Major highlights from the exhibition will include a dramatic, spotlit gallery showcasing how both designers have been influenced by fashion history, featuring Westwood’s sweeping silk taffeta ball gowns inspired by 18th-century court dress presented alongside Kawakubo’s punk interpretations in pink vinyl and rich floral jacquard. Another display will juxtapose the bold, red tartans, English tweeds, grey plaids and navy pinstripes of Kawakubo with Westwood’s iconic tailoring.

Other key looks include Westwood’s iconic punk ensembles from the late 1970s, popularised by London bands such as The Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux, a romantic MacAndreas tartan gown from Westwood’s Anglomania collection (autumn/winter 1993-1994), famously worn by Kate Moss on the catwalk, and the original version of the corseted wedding dress first shown in the Wake Up, Cave Girl, autumn-winter 2007-2008 collection, which was later worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in ‘Sex and The City: The Movie’.

Key works designed by Kawakubo include a sculptural petal ensemble worn by Rihanna on the red carpet and dramatic abstract works that challenge the relationship between the body and clothing, including the gingham sculptural designs from the Body Meets Dress - Dress Meets Body collection from spring/summer 1997.

Commenting on Australia hosting the groundbreaking exhibition, Colin Brooks, minister for Creative Industries in Australia, added: “Westwood | Kawakubo builds on the NGV’s incredible track record of more than 50 jaw-dropping fashion exhibitions, again celebrating the work and creativity of some of the world’s most iconic designers.

“With the largest and most significant fashion and textiles collection in the southern hemisphere, the NGV is already a major drawcard for fashion lovers, and this exhibition is set to attract visitors from far and wide.”