Lifestyle

12 California experiences to add to your bucket list, one for every month of the year

Published

1 year ago

January 2, 2025

12 California experiences to add to your bucket list, one for every month of the year

Has it occurred to you that civilization might be overrated?

Me too. So I’ve been thinking about the natural world — actually, the many natural worlds contained within California, and how whole they can make us feel.

With that and the new year in mind, here are a dozen seasonally suitable classic California adventures. These are places where you can huddle with a loved one or steer clear of people entirely.

If you’ve been in the state a while, you’ve probably tried a few of them. Maybe you’ve meant to try a few more. And maybe 2025 is the year to act on that idea.

January: Spy on whales off San Diego

Gray whales migrate along the California coast from December through May, prompting winter whale-watching boats to head out regularly from harbors up and down the state. San Diego has a hefty supply of them, including Adventure Whale Watching (which uses rigid inflatable boats that are smaller and faster than the catamarans and other vessels most companies use), H&M Landing, San Diego Whale Watch, Oceanside Whale Watching and City Cruises by Hornblower. Excursions typically last two to four hours and cost $40 to $109 per adult.

On any of those boats, you should hear plenty about the wonders of Eschrichtius robustus (the gray whale), which gets up to 49 feet long, often migrating 10,000 miles (round trip) in a year.

Meanwhile, you may come across pods of dolphins — sometimes hundreds — leaping in the surf. Several dolphin species are common in these waters.

BTW: San Diego also has a few strong spots for whale watching from land, especially Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve in La Jolla and Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma. If you don’t get around to chasing whales this winter, blue whales and fin whales swim through the same coastal waters May through November, and humpback and minke whales may be seen year-round.

February: Zip down Mammoth Mountain

Skiers walking by the lodge at Mammoth Mountain.

Every winter, legions zoom up from Southern California for winter sports at Mammoth Mountain (and many more come in other seasons for hiking, fishing and mountain biking). The ski and snowboarding operation, which includes 25 lifts, 3,500 skiable acres and a season that usually runs November through June, was founded in 1953 by a moonlighting hydrologist named Dave McCoy.

The mountain also has 19 miles of cross-country skiing based at the rustic lakeside Tamarack Lodge (which has the resort’s fanciest restaurant, the Lakefront) and 1,500 acres of beginner-friendly territory at nearby June Mountain (where kids 12 and under ski or ride for free).

BTW: To break up the 300-mile L.A. to Mammoth drive, detour into the rugged Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, where dozens of movies and TV shows have been filmed, including the first “Lone Ranger” film from 1938. Check out Lone Pine’s Museum of Western Film History. Farther up the road you’ll hit Bishop, the best place for a bite or overnight on the way to Mammoth.

March: Roam among Antelope Valley poppies

Visitors walk through fields of California poppies in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve

The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve’s rolling hills go orange in spring, usually March to May. The poppy bloom, which varies widely from year to year, can blanket the slopes. Purple lupine and other wildflowers may show up too. This 1,781-acre preserve ($10 per car to enter) includes eight miles of broad, smooth paths for walking among the flowers. (A portion, just west of the visitor center, is wheelchair-accessible.) Don’t pick any poppies or go tromping off-trail. But you can lead your friends to a high spot, such as Antelope Butte Vista Point to the east or Tehachapi Vista Point to the west, and then casually mention that Eschscholzia californica has been the state flower since 1903.

BTW: In years like 2019, when a superbloom attracted thousands of visitors, the reserve’s parking lot isn’t nearly big enough. (In 2024, the parking was easy because the blooms were subpar.) Bear in mind that many poppies bloom on roadside slopes outside the reserve. If you can do so safely, legally park on a shoulder along or near Lancaster Road and you might save $10.

April: Hear Burney Falls roar

A visitor poses with arms raised on a rock at Burney Falls.

Near the northern edge of California, you can see four or more waterfalls in a day. But some get crowded on summer weekends, so a visit in spring (especially on a weekday) will give you more elbow room. The big one is Burney Falls, 129 feet high, with a wide, thundering cascade. It’s the headliner at McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, about 65 miles northeast of Redding ($10 to enter; note that some trails, including the Falls Loop Trail, have been closed for long-term maintenance work).

Next, head to McCloud Falls, a series of three cascades about 45 miles northwest of Burney Falls along California 89. It’s seven miles round trip to hike the trail connecting the three cascades; all are part of Shasta-Trinity National Forest, with campgrounds nearby.

May: See green along Highway 46, west of Paso Robles

A person looks over the hills while standing along Highway 46, west of Paso Robles.

So long as it rains just a little in spring, the drive along Highway 46 between Paso Robles and the San Luis Obispo County coast is 22 miles of scenery so green and gorgeous, it’s a traffic hazard. Verdant hills. Grizzled oaks. Grapevines in formation like troops about to march. Country roads that will take you to tasting rooms. As you head west, you’ll glimpse Morro Rock and the blue Pacific in the distance. When you reach the traffic circle at Vineyard Drive, about 4.6 miles west of Highway 101, you may be tempted to wander off on Vineyard for a few miles of low-speed bucolic splendor. Do it. When you’re westbound on 46 again, you’ll find several scenic turnout spots as it twists and swoops to its end at Highway 1. From there, you’ll be choosing between Cambria (4 miles north) and Cayucos (11 miles south), with the hamlet of Harmony on the way.

BTW: If you’re overnighting in Paso Robles, consider Sensorio, a walk-through display of ever-changing lights, most of it concocted by artist Bruce Munro. Imagine electric flowers with a dimmer switch. (And in some displays, the changing colors are set to music.) It’s generally open Thursday through Sunday nights. Adult all-access passes start at $65.

June: Raft the American River’s South Fork

River guide Kyle Brazil navigates the American River, near Coloma, in a dinghy.

Running a river is a signature thrill in California’s Gold Country — and if it’s early summer, you can expect a few splashes of cold water on your face. Guides say the South Fork of the American River is a perfect introduction to river rafting, thanks to its evocative scenery, relatively mild Class III rapids and proximity to campgrounds and the pleasant town of Placerville.

Rookies should sign on with a licensed, experienced company. Family-friendly river floats typically begin north of Placerville, below the Chili Bar Reservoir, near Coloma. All-day rafting trips typically cost $100 to $180 per person. Half-day trips also are often available.

BTW: Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where the Gold Rush began, is less than a mile from many of Coloma’s whitewater rafting outfitters along California 49.

July: Soar (or stand by) at the Torrey Pines Gliderport

A paraglider glides over the cliffs with an ocean horizon in the background at Torrey Pines Gliderport.

This is the place to see people jump off a cliff, then rise on the updraft. The gliderport sits between the UC San Diego campus and the Pacific, sending skyward a steady stream of paraglider pilots and the occasional model airplane. Grab breakfast or lunch at the Cliffhanger Cafe (where none of the soup or sandwiches costs more than $11.25), settle in at a picnic table and watch the action in the air. (On Saturday afternoons in summer, there’s usually live music.)

Sail planes were taking off here as early as the 1920s. In 1930, Charles Lindbergh glided on these winds. Hang gliders joined in the 1970s, then paragliders, then tandem paraglider flights (bookable for $200). See the shoreline about 200 feet below? That’s Black’s Beach, accessible by a steep, half-mile trail. (The beach also has a nude zone.)

BTW: For a smoother hike to the beach and equally amazing views, try the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. For straight-up beach time, head for the sand beneath the cliffs at Torrey Pines State Beach.

August: Camp or kayak at Santa Cruz Island

Hills meet the the water at a coastal section of Santa Cruz Island.

On a clear day, you might glimpse the silhouette of Santa Cruz Island from the California mainland. But it takes a boat ride out there — ideally followed by a night of camping — to appreciate the island’s rugged bluffs, flowery meadows, raw beaches and sea caves. It’s the largest section of the chronically under-visited Channel Islands National Park.

The island’s Scorpion Anchorage, where most visitors arrive, is about an hour’s boat ride via Island Packers from Ventura Harbor. You can do a day trip or camp. Either way, you can snorkel and kayak in sea caves with a guide and rented vessel from Channel Islands Adventure Co. Or hike to Smugglers Cove. On your way, keep an eye out for island foxes, once endangered, now plentiful and skilled in campsite food thievery. (Island Packers, which has sailed among the Channel Islands for decades, is the National Park Service’s concessionaire for transport to and from the mainland.)

Once, the island’s hills and valleys were home to 11 Chumash villages (and Santa Cruz served as a sheep ranch as recently as 1984). Nowadays, there’s one 31-site campground about half a mile’s walk from Scorpion Anchorage. The park service controls about a quarter of Santa Cruz. The rest, owned by the Nature Conservancy, is off-limits.

BTW: If you only have time for a day trip, consider nearby Anacapa Island, home to a 1932 lighthouse, spectacular views and two miles of trails. But maybe wait another month. During the March-through-August nesting season, that island sees enough swooping, shrieking, pooping seabirds to trouble Alfred Hitchcock’s dreams.

September: Hike Yosemite, far from cars

Clouds cover a portion of the cliffs at Yosemite's Half Dome.

Yosemite National Park is vast, gorgeous and busy in summer, even when there’s a day-trip reservation requirement in place. But if you wait until the second half of September, when most kids have gone back to school, the chaos is reduced. And as soon as you get one mile from the nearest road, chances are you’ll see a lot more trees than people. Be sure to check reservation requirements well ahead.

Once there, if you’re a newbie, head for Yosemite Falls, the great spigot of Yosemite Valley and North America’s tallest waterfall, a 2,425-foot medley of cascades down granite walls. Later maybe climb the Yosemite Falls Trail to Columbia Rock (two miles round trip). Or try the Mist Trail to the top of Vernal Falls.

But remember, the valley is six square miles in a 1,187-square-mile park. From there, you could drive into the high country and catch the panorama from Glacier Point. You could check out the Hetch Hetchy Valley. You could take Tioga Road (which usually closes for the winter in November, reopening in late May or June) to Olmsted Point, Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya Lake.

BTW: Lodging options inside the park have shrunk with the indefinite closure of the Wawona Hotel on Dec. 2. Also bear in mind: An extensive seismic retrofit was due to continue at the Ahwahnee Hotel through the end of 2024; and Aramark, the concession company whose subsidiary runs the Ahwahnee and other Yosemite operations, has been faulted by parks officials for multiple operational lapses in the last two years.

October: See trees at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

A hiker walks along the fern-lined Fern Canyon Trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

In Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, about 50 miles north of Eureka, Prairie Creek Trail leads hikers through a grove of implausibly tall old trees. The park’s Elk Prairie and Gold Bluffs Beach campgrounds also are popular, and its mile-long Fern Canyon trail is famed as a shooting location for the “Jurassic Park” movie “The Lost World.”

The surrounding Redwoods National and State Parks include miles of trails and coastline north and south of the Klamath River estuary, including the rocky coastal view from High Bluff Overlook. Even in summer, this territory is relatively uncrowded. In fall, that will be doubly true. (Del Norte County’s population is less than 30,000.) Just be ready to be cool and damp. If you need a bed or breakfast, consider the Historic Requa Inn, a rustic landmark alongside the Klamath River that dates to 1914.

November: Gather driftwood at Moonstone Beach

A conical driftwood sculpture on the beach at Cambria's Moonstone Beach.

Cambria is a coastal town for all seasons. The shoreline is mostly rugged and rocky, with pines marching up steep, often-foggy slopes. In the midst of this waits Moonstone Beach, often strewn with driftwood, and Moonstone Beach Drive, which is lined by about a dozen inns and boutique hotels.

Stroll the mile-long Moonstone Beach Boardwalk. Make a fort out of some driftwood. Hike on the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve‘s Bluff Trail. Sample the eclectic menu at Robin’s Restaurant (a mainstay for more than 25 years), dig into olallieberry pie at Linn’s Restaurant (more than 30 years). Or stand in line for seafood at the cash-only, no-reservations Sea Chest Oyster Bar, which turns 50 in 2025.

BTW: Remember to visit San Simeon and Hearst Castle, about nine miles up the road. Also remember that you can’t continue up Highway 1 to Big Sur. The highway is closed two miles north of Lucia for major repairs. Caltrans officials say they expect to reopen some time in 2025, with a date to be determined.

December: Hug a boulder in Joshua Tree’s Hidden Valley

A rock formation at Hidden Valley in Joshua Tree National Park.

Hidden Valley in Joshua Tree National Park draws climbers, boulderers, desert campers and geology geeks from all over. Hidden Valley has 44 first-come, first-served campsites (Joshua Tree has about 500 campsites total) and no water — but those rocks! They look even more amazing when reflected in the water that sometimes accumulates at nearby Barker Dam. There’s also prime stargazing and edgy art around the fringes of the park, courtesy of Noah Purifoy, High Desert Test Sites, Desert X and others.

BTW: If you don’t know much about singer-songwriter Gram Parsons’ life and death, you could book the Joshua Tree Inn, where Parsons spent his last night in Room 8.

Lifestyle

It Started with a Midnight Swim and a Kiss Under the Stars

Published

52 minutes ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

It Started with a Midnight Swim and a Kiss Under the Stars

When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.

The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.

“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”

Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.

Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.

Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.

Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”

One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.

It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.

Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”

In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.

“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”

They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.

Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.

“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.

While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”

Lifestyle

L.A. Affairs: I loved someone who felt he couldn’t be fully seen with me

Published

2 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

L.A. Affairs: I loved someone who felt he couldn’t be fully seen with me

He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.

His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.

I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.

I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.

For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.

The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.

On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.

I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.

Outside was still another matter.

In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.

“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”

I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.

We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.

That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”

He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.

“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”

I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.

My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.

I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.

You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.

He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.

The author lives in Los Angeles.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Lifestyle

The Nerve Center of This Art Fair Isn’t Painting. It’s Couture.

Published

13 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Press Room

The Nerve Center of This Art Fair Isn’t Painting. It’s Couture.

The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.

When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.

Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.

“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.

Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.

The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.

Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”

Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.

Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.

Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.

More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.

The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.

“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”

Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”

Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”

True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.

“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”

Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.