You may have heard about the exhibition opening this week in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring Japanese fashion designer, Rei Kawakubo, but did you know your own Cincinnati Art Museum also has a significant collection of Kawakubo’s work? And is getting a lot more! This week, volunteer Donna Anderson helped sew fabric tape accession labels into some of the hundreds of new Kawakubo arrivals for the Fashion and Textile Arts Collection. You can see one of the 6 or so racks’-worth of Rei Kawakubo designs behind Donna while she is labeling a blouse designed by Kawakubo for Comme des Garçon’s “Adult Punk” collection, fall/winter 1997. Accession labels help us identify and keep track of collection objects. This piece’s accession label will read “2016.180a,” which tells us it became part of the collection in 2016, was the 180^th accessioned object for that year, and is part of a set: “a” is the blouse, “b” and “c” are its matching skirt and stole.   

Image Credit: Blouse, Skirt and Stole, Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, b. 1942) designer; Comme des Garçons (Japanese, estab. 1969) label, Japan, cotton, polyester, modacrylic, acrylic, Museum Purchase: Lawrence Archer Wachs Trust Fund, 2016.180a.