As part of a budding focus on textile arts, costume and fashion, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado will explore how avant-garde and deconstructionist Japanese designers exploded the Paris fashion world of the 1980s with Shock Wave: Japanese Fashion Design, 1980s-90s, due to open on 11 September (until 28 May 2017). This is the French fashion historian Florence Müller’s curatorial début at the museum since coming on board a year ago to expand its holdings of 20th- and 21st-century fashion. The exhibition—which includes around 70 ensembles by designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons) and Issey Miyake—looks at radical approaches to the relationship between clothing and the body, references to pop culture, playing with tradition and other ways these designers shook up the status quo. It also presents their impact on the next wave of designers in Europe in the 1990s, including Maison Martin Margiela and Dries Van Noten.
