Ensemble

Since founding Comme des Garçons ("like some boys") in 1969, the Tokyo-based designer Rei Kawakubo has consistently defined and redefined the aesthetics of her time. Collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body. Kawakubo’s spring/summer 1991 collection, “Ink Dye, Stained Glass,” deviated from the outsized silhouettes, consistent black palette, and intentionally destroyed garments that characterized her 1980s collections. Rather than obscure the body with excess fabric, Kawakubo used chiffons, mousselines, and stretch synthetics in long, narrow silhouettes that followed and revealed the form. The collection was designed to project calm and lightness in response to global conflict during the period. The stained glass group of ensembles from the collection are printed with images of medieval stained glass from Chartres Cathedral and Laon Cathedral in France. This ensemble features a composite of images taken from the glass in the south rose window at Chartres.