MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper evaluates how Rei Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body SS19917 collection centers the maternal body as the cultural understanding of a fetus is being displaced from the womb. Beginning with the Nilsson’s 1965 cover of Life Magazine depicting an embryo floating in a semi-opaque sac on an abstract background moving to the invention of sonograms and non-diagnostic 3 and 4D prenatal scans, technological advances have changed obstetrics’ focus from safely getting the baby out, to getting in to see the baby. Images of embryos and fetuses have permeated throughout the West, allowing for false trait-readings, personality projections, and premature individual identity to be used as fodder for the anti-choice movement. It is the notion of the “transparent body,” that Kawakubo rejects in this collection. Already established in relation to the maternal body, this paper specifies this argument. Using see through and semi opaque fabrics Kawakubo exaggerates what parts of the body are visible, playing with the public and private aspects of pregnancy. The notorious “lumps and bumps” are covered by opaque fabric, rejecting visual access to the interior and most distinct aspect of the collection. Kawakubo also uses the padding to lengthen the maternal timeline into the postpartum. Using larger padding and ruching, Kawakubo invokes imagery of a rebozo baby wrap. In direct opposition to early identity, Kawakubo binds the postpartum body and baby into one, extending the maternal body schema, and announcing the necessary reproductive labor of a baby still reliant on their mother. This paper examines the ways in which this collection centers the maternal body through formal analyses, examines her collaboration with Merce Cunningham as dancers move through choreography with unfamiliar body boundaries, and compares these representations to the way our society is conceptualizing the fetus further and further removed from the maternal body.