This summer, the National Gallery of Victoria will showcase a bold fashion exhibition featuring Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo.

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) are hoping their just-announced summer exhibition will live up to the success of last summer's Yayoi Kusama , which this year became the most visited art exhibition in Australian history.

Westwood | Kawakubo, which opens in December, will showcase the innovative work of two of the most celebrated names in fashion: the late British designer Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022), and Japanese designer and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo (born 1942).

"We can only try to exceed those numbers, right?" NGV's curator of fashion and textiles, Dani Whitfield, says with a laugh.

"What you're hoping for with these exhibitions is that people that maybe don't know these designers come along and learn something and walk away feeling inspired."

Westwood | Kawakubo features more than 140 designs by Westwood and Kawakubo, including more than 100 from the NGV's own collection, as well as works from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Palais Galliera in Paris. They'll be accompanied by archival material, photography, film and runway footage.

Through five themes — Punk and Provocation; Rupture; Reinvention; The Body: Freedom and Restraint; and The Power of Clothes — the exhibition charts Westwood and Kawakubo's careers: from Westwood's early work in London's punk scene, dressing the likes of the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux; to the latter work of Kawakubo, whose designs inspired the theme for the 2017 Met Gala.

"We look at two designers who were born in a similar historical moment in different places, but who had this incredible desire to change fashion and to work within the system, but also critique it," Whitfield says.

"Ultimately, we're thinking about what it means to be a woman designing for women."

Challenging the rules of fashion

Both Westwood and Kawakubo shaped and reshaped the rules of women's fashion in the late 20th century.

With her then-partner, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Westwood — who was also a teacher — opened the shop Let It Rock (later renamed SEX) in London in 1971. Their collaboration shaped the style of 70s punk rock; think tartan, ripped T-shirts and safety pins.

"When you think about Westwood's origins in punk, it's really redefining the look of fashion," Whitfield explains. "Fashion can be distressed; it can be ragged; it doesn't have to be beautiful.

"It changes the way that we think about gender ideals and what conventional femininity is supposed to look like. Through that challenge, [Westwood] creates [clothing] that feels empowering for the wearer."

In the 80s, Westwood subverted expectations, drawing on 18th- and 19th-century women's fashion, including corsetry, bustles and crinolines (stiff, structured petticoats).

For example, she was inspired by Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka to create a "mini-crini", combining the restrictiveness of the crinoline with the so-called "liberation" of the miniskirt, popularised by designer Mary Quant in the 60s.

"She brings [those garments] to the outer layer and turns them into these empowering items of clothing, which were about celebrating female sexuality," Whitfield says.

Meanwhile, Kawakubo, who founded Comme des Garçons in 1969, crafted clothes that were the "complete antithesis" of those seen on Paris runways at the time, which veered towards spectacle and the male gaze.

"She really came to fashion with this idea of wiping the slate clean, producing collections that were black and asymmetrical and distressed," Whitfield says.

Kawakubo herself has said that she designed her clothes for "self-sufficient" working women; "women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds".

"Her clothing was shapeless and androgynous … It was a much more conceptual way of dressing, which was about taking ownership," Whitfield says.

Westwood | Kawakubo even features designs from Comme des Garçons's upcoming collection — giving the exhibition a sense of the full scope of Kawukobo's career.

"Closer to the present day, the more and more avant-garde she becomes," Whitfield says. "She's somebody who just continues to really push and push."

By pairing the two designers, NGV is emphasising their similar concerns — about beauty, taste, the ideal body, and the function and form of clothing.

"Fashion should be empowering, fashion should be challenging, it should ask questions," Whitfield says.

"[Westwood and Kawakubo's clothing] comes from a place of thinking really deeply about what fashion can mean.

"It's not simply just the look of it, but how fashion is used to express an identity … I think everybody's always using fashion to speak about themselves."

Bringing fashion into the gallery

Westwood | Kawakubo is the third NGV summer blockbuster in the past five years to focus on fashion, following Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto in 2021; and Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse in 2022.

But it's not the first time a major Australian gallery has turned its focus on Westwood and Kawakubo — following NGV's own Collecting Comme in 2019, and a Westwood retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 2004.

Whitfield says bringing fashion into a gallery context doesn't change the meaning behind the clothes — but instead offers an opportunity to put the designs into a historical and cultural context.

"It's about drawing people's attention to the importance of those [cultural] shifts [and] of those designs," Whitfield says.

"[It's about] showing not just how [the clothing] looked, but how they were made and how they were constructed, and the innovations [behind them] — aesthetic or material or technical."

Designers like Westwood and Kawakubo belong in the gallery because, like all artists, they offer different ways of seeing the world.

"There's no one way of doing anything," Whitfield says.

"[Westwood and Kawakubo] played with form and function, they've turned [clothing] inside out, they've exaggerated, they've parodied, and they've questioned, and I think that's really appealing.

"It is in that kind of spirit that we should all be dressing every day, don't you think?"

Westwood | Kawakubo is at NGV International from December 7-April 19.