Rei Kawakubo

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?' (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Stanley Cavell and the Arts (Bloomsbury, 2020) and, with David Denny, co-editor of Lars von Trier's Women (Bloomsbury, 2018).

• List of Illustrations1. Rex Butler (editor) ‘Introduction: For and against Fashion’2. Akiko Fukai ‘Couture Clash’ (excerpt)3. Barbara Vinken ‘The Empire Designs Back’ (excerpt)4. Karinna Nobbs and Kat Duffy ‘Rei Kawakubo as Retail Format Pioneer’5. Llewellyn Negrin ‘Rei Kawakubo: Agent Provocateur in a Hyper-Glamourised World’6. Yuniya Kawamura ‘Rei Kawakubo: Defiance Personified’7. Masafumi Monden ‘The Subversively Cute Side of Comme des Garçons: Rei Kawakubo and Romantic Transgression’8. Tets Kimura ‘Exploring the Theoretical Meaning of Rei Kawakubo: Two Waves of Arrivals of Japanese Fashion in the West and Georg Simmel’s Fashion Dualism’9. Karen de Perthuis ‘Performing the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s Fashion Manifesto’10. Ory Bartal ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Luxury of Freedom’11. Bronwyn Clark-Coolee ‘The Complexity of Kawakubo: A Radical Form of Consciousness’12. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas ‘Between Clothing and Flesh: Kawakubo at the Met’13. Alison Gill ‘From Amidst the Betwixt and Between: The Gap between the Not-Worn and the Worn that is Opened Up by the Photographic Images in Rei Kawakubo’s Exhibition Catalogue’14. Rex Butler ‘Rei Kawakubo: Fashion Degree Zero’Bibliography Index

An impressively broad and highly entertaining mix of established and emerging fashion scholars tackling, with style, that most enigmatic, contrarian and complex of designers ... While some of the paradoxes of Kawakubo]s work remain, this collection enlightens and delights like the designer herself.