More than eight years after its debut, Rei Kawakubo's Spring Summer 2018 Multidimensional Graffiti remains one of the house's most memorable collections. Let's revisit how Kawakubo overloaded the runway with centuries of visual culture, ranging from Renaissance Painting and Japanese shojo illustration to digital graphics and childhood iconography, creating a physical reflection on nostalgia, innocence and the way images are layered and consumed in contemporary online culture.
Lifted from the show note and translated by Adrian Joffe, 'Multidimensional Graffiti' perfectly described how Kawakubo manipulated these flat, two dimensional images and artworks into exaggerated three dimensional sculptural garments. Paintings, illustrations and graphics wrapped around inflated volumes, disappeared into folds and stretched across bulbous silhouettes, allowing the prints to be experienced from constantly shifting perspectives as the models moved through the runway.
By collapsing boundaries between different forms of visual images, Kawakubo brought together references from vastly different periods. Italian Mannerist Painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Vertumnus, a portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II constructed entirely from fruits, flowers, and vegetables from circa 1591, appeared alongside the romantic shojo illustrations of Macoto Takahashi, whose large-eyed girls helped define postwar Japanese manga.
The collection also incorporated the monochromatic ink landscapes of Sesson Shūkei, floral still lifes by Dutch painter Abraham Mignon, the pixelated cityscapes of digital art collective eBoy, the loose illustrations of Stefan Marx, mixed-media imagery by Anne Marie Grgich and the dreamlike painted faces of Serge Vollin. These were paired with Hello Kitty, teddy bears, balloons, toys and other playful objects embedded into Julien d'Ys' towering sculptural wigs and similarly layered CDG necklaces.
Together, these references formed a visual landscape where Renaissance portraiture, traditional Japanese painting, manga, contemporary illustration, childhood memorabilia and digital culture existed on the same plane without hierarchy, parallel to how different graffitis exist in urban spaces.
The soundtrack moved between contemporary tracks including FKA twigs' Two Weeks, Alesso's Falling and Lisa Stansfield's Change, before concluding with Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. As the final look entered, the colorful collage of paintings, manga, toys, and childhood symbols gave way to one of the most mournful compositions ever written. When the models gathered shoulder to shoulder for the finale, the collection's disparate visual references merged into a monumental three dimensional wall for the seated audience.
This dress features an all over print of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Vertumnus and is constructed with darts and panels on both the front and back, creating the illusion of protrusion and volume.