Highlights
An opportunity to think about and reevaluate what it means to wear clothes.
Throughout the history of humankind, a passion for wearing clothing has been expressed in many different ways. For instance, furs have been valued since ancient times as a symbol of wealth or authority, but today, they induce conflicting emotions. We champion the protection of animals, yet still crave the touch and warmth that fur brings.This exhibition is based on clothes and other fashion items from the KCI’s collection of costume from the eighteenth century to the present day. The exhibits encourage us to ponder the various forms of ‘Love’ that can be seen in relation to fashion.
Dress, Shirt, T-shirt, and Leggings (detail)
A/W 2021 Haute Couture
©The Kyoto Costume Institute
photo: Moriya Yuki
Exhibits replete with the ‘Love’ of those who wear them and create them.
Exhibits include eighteenth century court garments featuring exquisite floral patterns, headwear embellished with birds so lifelike that you expect them to move, and dresses with incredibly thin waists or voluminous sleeves. What we see as excesses and eccentricities in historical costume are actually concentrated doses of the tastes of people who once wore those fashions. Today, contemporary designers still bring new shapes and significance to their looks, enabling us to change our everyday moods, and at times giving us the sense of transforming into something else altogether. Examples include Helmut Lang’s extremely pared down designs, reduced to minimal codes, and clothing by Comme des Garçons that disrupts conventional ideas to transcend time and gender, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Each exhibit is replete with the passionate ‘Love’ of both those who wear the costumes, and those who create them.
1775 (fabric: 1760s)
©The Kyoto Costume Institute
photo: Hatakeyama Takashi
Contemporary art introduces the diverse nature of “I” in today’s world.
Wearing clothing acts on the physical outline that reflects the internal I/Me. This exhibition presents contemporary art by contemporary artists, introducing the diverse nature of “I” in today’s world, a society in which we face a complex variety of desires and struggles. Exhibits include the photographs of Wolfgang Tillmans affirming the everyday lives of his friends, paintings by Matsukawa Tomona that depict the emotional reality of women living in these times, based on interviews of women of her own generation, and works by AKI INOMATA that associate human identities with the figures of hermit crabs by giving them new shells to wear. All explore questions arising from the nature of “I” today.
Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter” to Hermit Crabs? –Border–
2010/2019
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
©AKI INOMATA
About 130 exhibits: clothing, other fashion items, and artworks.
This exhibition is based on 74 items of clothing and 15 other fashion items from the KCI’s collection of costume from the eighteenth century to the present day, accompanied by some 40 artworks, comprising about 130 exhibits in total.
New works for this exhibition.
Exhibits at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery include Shadowing, a recent video work featuring digital humans modelled on Japanese-American residents of Hawaii, created by Harada Yuki, an artist whose popularity is growing through solo exhibitions and group appearances. New works by other artists for this exhibition are also featured in each chapter of the exhibition.
Shadowing (Three Self-Portraits)
2023
©Yuki Harada photo: Muramatsu Katsura
