Don Brown: Yoko V

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 4 to September 4 2017

This show was a total departure from the Met’s usual costume exhibits. it felt less like a fashion retrospective and more like a trip to a high-concept laboratory on another planet.

She show was a shock to the system. No chronological timelines and, most strikingly, no glass barriers and zero wall text to explain what I was looking at. Instead, the space was a stark, fluorescent-lit landscape of white geometric “pods” (circles, squares, and cylinders) that housed Kawakubo’s radical silhouettes. The clothes themselves are defiant; they ignore the human body entirely, adding “lumps and bumps” in places nature never intended (the 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection is even more jarring in person). Because there were no labels to lean on, I found myself looking at the volume of the red nylon and the architecture of the shredded lace rather than thinking about “fashion.” The “In-Between” refers to the space between clothes and art, subject and object. Kawakubo designs for ideas that just happen to be worn by people.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Looking back, this 2017 show was the moment the “Met Gala” era truly collided with high-concept avant-garde art. It remains one of the few times a living designer has been given that kind of space at the Met, and it’s clear why.