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it is important to show how people are stepping out of those boxes and making really compelling work." For her part, the English designer has been clear about what she hopes the Texas audience will gain from the exhibition. "The most important weapon we have is public opinion," Westwood has said. "Go to art galleries, start to understand the world you live in — as soon as you are doing that, you're a freedom fighter." Paulo Roversi: "Birds" "My collaboration with Rei Kawakubo goes back a long time," Paolo Roversi says of his nearly four-decade collaboration with the designer for the fashion house Comme des Garçons. "Each time working with her is a new inspiring adventure. Because the Dallas Contemporary focuses on all arts, including fashion, it seemed a good opportunity to show my work together with hers." Roversi, one of the most in-demand photographers in the world of fashion, is known for portraits and fashion photography that manage to be dreamy, lyrical, and incredibly modern. The curator of the Roversi exhibition is Dennis Freedman, long the creative director of W magazine and, later, of Barneys New York. Freedman, now an independent curator based in New York, has worked closely with Roversi since the early '90s. "I have always thought that Paolo's work is extraordinary," Freedman says. "And I thought this was something that Peter Doroshenko could be interested in for Dallas. In the end, we decided that it would be most effective if it was limited to one aspect. It was Paolo's idea to concentrate on the photographs he has taken of Comme des Garçons. It was a very wise decision — a solid concentration of his work." Last fall, Doroshenko was shown hundreds of Roversi photographs of Comme des Garçons garments and advertising campaigns, and he insisted that the exhibition had to happen as soon as possible. "Roversi has always been on the list of people we wanted to engage with," the museum director says. "There was a lot of movement in the Comme des Garçons images, male and female models in this airy state. That is how we came to the title 'Birds.'" There is a dizzying variety of images in the show. "There are many approaches that Paolo took to his work here, each based on a particular collection," Freedman says. "So, there are groupings of different approaches: black and white, muted colors, intense reds — all very illustrative of the range of Paolo's career." Freedman hopes to present the photos in a dramatic setting that reflects the radical aesthetic of Kawakubo, whose designs — jarring lumps and strange, startling silhouettes — were the subject of a 2017 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's the combination of the two creators, photographer and designer, that makes the exhibition so compelling. "Compared with almost any other body of work from the fashion world, Comme des Garçons is certainly one of the greatest and the most poetic," Freedman says. "Putting one of the most poetic of designers with one of the most poetic of photographers is a terrific way for the public to see two great artists and how they respond to one another. I think that is at the heart of why this exhibition is so interesting. It's a gem of a show." William Middleton is a fashion journalist and former Texan based in Paris. He is the author of Double Vision, the biography of Dominique and John de Menil, and is currently writing a biography of Karl Lagerfeld. 46 © PAOLO ROVERSI Paolo Roversi's Norton, Paris, 2018, from "Paolo Roversi: Birds" at Dallas Contemporary Paolo Roversi's Selfportrait, Paris, 2011, from "Paolo Roversi: Birds" at Dallas Contemporary Vivienne Westwood's +5 Degrees Map, 2012, represents the effects of climate change on the Earth. © PAOLO ROVERSI © VIVIENNE WESTWOOD