The summer blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) is celebrating the work of two globally celebrated designers and mavericks – Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo of Gommes des Garçons in Westwood | Kawakubo.

The two designers were born a year apart (Westwood in 1941 and Kawakubo 1942), but only the latter is still with us, Westwood dying in 2022 at the age of 81. The queen of punk design and co-founder of Sex, the boutique she ran with her second husband Malcolm McLaren (1946 to 2010) on the King’s Road in London, Westwood was crowned British Fashion Designer of the Year in 1990, 1991 and 2006.

Pairing her with the Japanese born and raised Kawakubo is a testament to the status of both designers as iconoclasts and visionaries, who took clothing and fashion and pushed the boundaries until they’d almost disappeared over a cliff.

At the NGV, nearly 150 innovative and ground-breaking designs have been curated to explore the convergences and divergences between these two self-taught rebels of the fashion world. The exhibition brings together loans from international museums and private collections – including New York’s Metropolitan Museum, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Palais Galliera, and the Vivienne Westwood archive – alongside more than 100 pieces from the NGV’s own Collection, more than 80 of which having only recently entered that Collection.

A total of 40 of the works were recently gifted to the NGV by Comme des Garçons especially for this exhibition. 

Exhibition highlights

Exhibition highlights include Westwood’s iconic punk ensembles from the late 1970s, made famous by London bands and punk luminaries such as The Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees. There is also a romantic MacAndreas tartan gown from Westwood’s Anglomania collection (autumn-winter 1993-94), worn by Kate Moss on the runway; and the original version of the corseted Wedding dress from the Wake Up, Cave Girl Autumn-winter 2007-08 collection, sported by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and The City: The Movie.  

Notable moments in the exhibition include a spotlit gallery highlighting how both designers have been influenced by fashion and dressmaking history. Westwood’s silk taffeta ball gowns inspired by 18th century court dress are presented alongside Kawakubo’s punk interpretations in pink vinyl and rich floral jacquard. A further display juxtaposes the bold, red tartans, English tweeds, grey plaids and navy pinstripes of Kawakubo with Westwood’s iconic tailoring. Sculptural, deconstructed, cinched and exaggerated silhouettes demonstrate their exacting approaches to cutting and textile traditions. 

The exhibition design presents the two distinct voices of Westwood and Kawakubo as parallel yet fundamentally unique forces in fashion. The design uses symmetry as its cornerstone concept, presenting these designers like left and right hands; similar but not identical. 

Five themes

Westwood and Kawakubo’s practices are explored across five themes:

Punk and Provocation considers how punk, both aesthetically and conceptually, crystallised 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. These are juxtaposed by four notable works by Kawakubo demonstrating 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 was a constant influence, most notably in her Portrait collection (autumn-winter 1990), which featured prints of famous 18th 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 Westwood and Kawakubo have consistently challenged existing conventions related to ideal and idealised 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 utilise 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.   

The exhibition is being accompanied by a world-first publication, also titled Westwood | Kawakubo, exploring the intersecting histories of the designers with new reflections from industry experts including Bella Freud, Jane Mulvagh, Valerie Steele, Stephen Jones, Akiko Fukai, Chrissie Hynde, Alexander Fury, Ki Price and Zandra Rhodes.  

Westwood | Kawakubo will be on display from 7 December 2025 to 19 April 2026 at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Entry fees apply. Tickets and information are available via the NGV.