Her runways, too, are one of the few remaining places where you’ll find a completely whitewashed model lineup, a surprising thing considering that the most of her clientele are men and women of color. Most designers would get reamed for that fact, but Kawakubo has mostly escaped widespread criticism for it. That’s because it’s accepted that she treats her models as mannequins instead of stand-ins for her ideal consumers, covering their faces with makeup, wigs, and garments, sometimes completely obscuring their identities. To Kawakubo, the runway is not a place for people to use her clothes for their interpretation; it is a place for her to use people to relay her interpretation through clothes. To some, it’s fascism on the runway. To others, it’s art, full stop — and that argument is buttressed because most of the time, what’s shown on the runway is not actually for sale.