Back in 2017, A1043 – a contemporary gallery in Paris founded by artist Didier Courbot and landscape architect Stéphanie Courbot – hosted an exhibition of works by Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. While the radical Japanese fashion designer is best known for her sculptural, avant-garde clothing collections, the exhibition instead focused on her lesser-known furniture, created in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ‘It doesn’t have a classic definition; it’s outside the codes,’ Stéphanie told Wallpaper* at the time. ‘What's interesting is that design can often evolve from people who do not work in design.’
The latter statement provides the impetus for a new exhibition, ‘Fashion to Furniture’ (1 April – May 6, 2023), which opens at A1043 this week. Expanding on the works from Kawakubo – which feature once again here – the exhibition looks more widely at furniture created by fashion designers, from a slew of seminal names including Virgil Abloh, Ann Demeulemeester, Jean Paul Gaultier and Martin Margiela. The Courbots say that they were particularly drawn to the idea of creators working outside of the medium for which they are known: ‘Although it is not unusual for creators to go beyond the scope of their field, it is fair to say that these experiments often result in things that make an impression,’ they say.
