Deconstructivist Approach: Rei Kawakubo
I wanted to design the body itself, and I wanted to use stretch fabrics.
I was keenly aware of the difficulty of expressing something using garments alone. And that is how I arrived at the concept of designing the body.
Rei Kawakubo ((1) p.33)
Body becomes dress collection is recalling an important move toward affective fashion. The way the body is not restricted allowed the bodily movements to use self-styling by reclaiming an agency. Bodily movements are linked with the lived experiences and an interconnectedness with the zoe to a certain extent. In the performative sense of wearing Body becomes dress collection, the body freely self-organized itself by the "blending between the body and garment, nor can it be adequately described as a prosthetic “incorporation” of the object into the body"((2) p.250).
In her deconstructivist approach, the body is not conflicting with the perpetual estate of becoming which Braidotti mentioned by using the terms becoming-animal, becoming-earth, and becoming-machine. Avoiding the human subject oriented is something that Kawakubo does to move beyond the social construction of feminine qualities. By giving an interdependence with the materially wrapped body and the movements, Kawakubo avoids using mediation within the body to form an interconnected unity (3). The fact that the symmetry is destroyed, the pieces of this collection deconstruct the single-narrative point of view which could be transposed into the museum practices. Not only do the draperies refer to the classical sculptures, but also do change the posture of the body (physical posture) to challenge the invisibility of the non-human. What I mean by challenging the invisibility of the non-human is comprised in the idea of highlighting "minoritarian" features into a performative agent.
I really think that this point of view could be apply to fashion by prioritizing feminist interventions into museum practices to challenge the binary between genders. Instead of displaying the female body by using normative bodies, the female body could be represented with “lumps and bumps"((4) p.252). It could be interesting to compare Kawakubo insights into a non-phallocentric femininity. For sure, there is a contradictory discourse within the museum practices that has to be overcome by affirmative and unconventional projects.
