REI KAWAKUBO / COMME DES GARÇONS — Art of the In-Between, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017

Issued for the Costume Institute exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 4 May to 4 September 2017. Distinct from the accompanying hardback catalogue, this was the publication carried through the exhibition itself. Its contents organise Kawakubo’s work through nine states of “in-betweenness,” including Absence/Presence, Fashion/Antifashion, Self/Other and Clothes/Not Clothes.

Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in 1969 and repeatedly disrupted conventional ideas of clothing, beauty and the body. The exhibition presented garments less as fashion history than as a changing field between sculpture, architecture and dress.

The guide retains the exhibition’s provisional function: text, object list and floor plan compressed into a portable paper structure. An institutional map that has outlived the exhibition it was designed to navigate.

10.75 × 28 cm folded; 21.5 × 28 cm unfolded. 40 pages. Original offset-printed exhibition guide on lightweight paper; folded narrow-format construction with exhibition map and typographic cover. Condition: good. Light handling and surface marks, minor edge and corner softening, and a small crease to the lower-left corner. Original folds remain intact; internally complete.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.