Yohji Yamamoto

 

Yohji Yamamoto is widely considered to be one of the most influential fashion designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is one of the few designers in his field who has successfully blurred the line between commodity and art, creating clothing ranging from athletic shoes and denim jeans to couture-inspired gowns that are nothing short of malleable mobile sculptures. Yamamoto has been hailed as a master craftsman and philosophical dreamer, balancing the seemingly incompatible extremes of fashion's competing scales.

Despite his talent and the significance of his work, Yamamoto has yet to be the subject of serious critical debate among fashion journalists and historians. It's perhaps ironic that the only in-depth examination of Yamamoto—both the man and the designer—came from someone with little knowledge or interest in fashion. Wim Wenders, a well-known German filmmaker, made a documentary titled Notebook on Cities and Clothes in 1989. Wenders dramatized Yamamoto's creative genius throughout the film by juxtaposing the words of the late German philosopher Walter Benjamin against the urban backdrops of both Tokyo and Paris. Nonetheless, the director's probing failed to reveal the crucial elements that comprised Yamamoto's fashions. Neither the elements unique to dressmaking nor Yamamoto's specific aesthetic contributions were discussed.

Intangible inspiration, primarily images of historical dress from sources such as photographs, has been a constant in Yamamoto's work. The crumpled collar in an August Sander portrait, the gauzy dresses captured by Jacques-Henri Lartigue while vacationing on the Riviera, and the gritty realism of Françoise Huguier's Arctic Circle travels are just a few examples. It's no surprise that the captivating catalogs created for each of Yamamoto's high-end ready-to-wear women's collections have featured the work of notable photographers such as Nick Knight, Paolo Roversi, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Vinoodh Matadin. Yamamoto has come to epitomize the vast range of creative possibilities in the art of dress, whether evoking historicism through the ancien régime or the belle epoque, or ethnic garments made of richly woven silks and woolens.

Early Career

Yamamoto was born on October 3, 1943, in Tokyo. His father, who died in Manchuria during WWII, was never known to him; he was raised by his widowed mother Yumi. Yumi, a dressmaker by trade, experienced what Yamamoto describes as the humiliations of a highly skilled worker whose gender and station in life provided her with few opportunities to make a rewarding living or gain recognition for her talents. Yumi encouraged her son to pursue a legal career; he earned a law degree from Keio University but never practiced. The allure of becoming a designer, on the other hand, drew Yamamoto into the world of fashion.

Yamamoto studied fashion design at Tokyo's renowned Bunkafukuso Gakuin after finishing his university studies in 1966. Despite his master craftsman abilities, he began his career as an anonymous creator around 1970. Two years later, he began selling his own designs under the brand Y's. This label's clothing is now considered Yamamoto's lower-priced, or "bridge," line. In 1977, he debuted his Y's collection in Tokyo for the first time. In 1981, he co-designed and presented his first high-end women's ready-to-wear collection in Paris with his compatriot Rei Kawakubo. Kawakubo and Yamamoto pioneered the concept of deconstructed fashions over the next two years. Their revolutionary aesthetic stunned the world by appearing unfinished, tattered, and haphazardly put together clothing. Yamamoto's free, flowing silhouettes and constant use of black complemented his groundbreaking work, which became the preferred look of the 1980s urban aesthetic. Yamamoto debuted a deluxe menswear line in 1984 that featured many of the same elements.

Yamamoto's Aesthetic

Kawakubo and Yamamoto were defined as Japanese designers from the moment they presented their first fashion collections to an international audience in the 1980s. Almost every article about them, as well as critical reviews of their collections, began by describing them as inextricably linked to and encapsulated by their Asian heritage. Many journalists incorrectly assumed that they manufactured clothing for all Japanese people. The truth was that the loose, dark-colored, and seemingly tattered garments astounded the average Japanese just as much as they did the Western audiences who first saw them. Although Yamamoto's work changed and evolved over the next two decades, several key elements remained: gender ambiguity, the importance of black, and deconstruction aesthetics.

Gender Ambiguity

Many people were unaware of Yamamoto's professed love and respect for women because his clothes were frequently devoid of Western-style gender markers. He was opposed to overtly sexualized females and frequently dressed women in designs inspired by men's wear. Cross-gender role-playing has long been a part of Japanese culture and a recurring theme among performers and artists. Yamamoto's choice of women as models for his menswear fashion shows on multiple occasions was another small piece of his sexual identity puzzle.

Yamamoto's historical recontextualizations contrasted sharply with the work of other marquee designers, even when his later work embraced the sweeping romanticism of postwar Parisian haute couture. High heels, rising hemlines, plunging necklines, and sheer fabrics were conspicuously absent from his runway presentations, as were the other essentials of a modern high-fashion wardrobe for women. These characteristics may account for Yamamoto's dark tailored suits and white shirts for both men and women being some of his most enduring and compelling products. For over two centuries, Western men of all classes have worn dark suits and white shirts to convey both sexuality and power through conformity. Yamamoto used this combination of erotic appeal and strength to express his postwar version of male and female sexuality.

Basic Black

No other color in Yohji Yamamoto's fashion palette is as important as black. This early unyielding black-on-black aesthetic earned his followers the moniker karasuzoku, or crow tribe members. In Western history, black has certain associations that have been processed through a kaleidoscope of self-conscious modernist or postmodernist theories and assumptions. As a result of historical recontextualization, black had acquired a variety of meanings by the last quarter of the twentieth century, including poverty and devastation for some fashion critics and sobriety, intellectualism, chic, self-restraint, and nobility in dress for others.

The color's association with poverty reflects the aesthetic attributes of traditional Japan and contemporary culture, as well as the role black plays in fashion. For some, black represents an illusion of—or perhaps an allusion to—rusticity, simplicity, and self-control. In Japan, black dyes can denote both rural origin and noble warrior status. The couture atelier may also provide an important link between black and the symbolic associations of old Europe, traditional Japan, and the modern urban landscape. Yamamoto, like Cristóbal Balenciaga, frequently designed unadorned day suits, dresses, ball gowns, and coats. Woolens in charcoal gray, navy blue, and, of course, black were frequently molded and manipulated into pure sculptural forms that demonstrated both marvelous engineering and tailoring techniques as well as a love of dramatic form.

Deconstructed Styles

Fashion historians have yet to fully investigate the relationship between deconstruction, which began as a French philosophical movement, and contemporary fashion design. There is no direct evidence that such ideas were the driving force behind Yohji Yamamoto's early designs. It is more likely that he was influenced by a variety of factors, including Japan's postwar devastation and rapid reconstruction; the revolt against bourgeois tastes; an affiliation with European street styles; and a desire, similar to that of the early proponents of abstraction in fine art, to find a universal expression of design by erasing elements that assign people to specific socioeconomic and gender roles.

Aesthetically, the dressmaking techniques that gave Yamamoto's work its deconstructed appearance were also linked to traditional non-Western methods of clothing construction, as well as the idea that natural, organic, and imperfect objects can be beautiful. Yamamoto's clothes masked the body with voluminous folds and layers of dark fabric; they also reduced visible elements of clothing such as frontality and clear demarcations between the inside and outside of a garment.

Yamamoto's deconstruction fashion most likely began with him questioning the very nature of his postwar existence. Japan's initial efforts to rebuild its physical and political infrastructure, as well as its subsequent economic ascendancy, did provide the right environment to nurture the talents of an incredibly creative generation that included architects Tadao Ando, Arata Isozaki, and Kenzo Tange, as well as furniture designer Shiro Kuramata and fashion designers Yamamoto and Kawakubo.

It appears more likely that Yamamoto was motivated by the rage common among the generation that spearheaded the social changes of the 1960s. As a result, he developed a new fashion vision that railed against the bourgeois conformity that resulted from what Yamamoto referred to as American colonialism. Though the exact elements that led to his creation of his particular style are unknown, more than one journalist concluded that Yamamoto's clothing reflected a type of anger that evoked images of nuclear holocaust survivors and were labeled by some as the "Hiroshima bag lady" look. Some of his detractors even formed an alliance between his fashions and a coven of witches.

Despite such misunderstandings, Yamamoto's designs paralleled the rise of punk fashions and street style, as well as their connection with mid-twentieth-century urban decay. Indeed, more than one writer noted that Yamamoto's style was neither a pure invention nor a derivative of Asian culture. Like other disenfranchised English youth, London-based designers such as Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood turned clothing into a medium for political expression and were at the forefront of the punk movement.

Yamamoto's ability to see beauty in decay and to strip things down to their bare bones in search of the inherent integrity of each object, on the other hand, is profoundly Japanese. Wabi-sabi is defined by its aesthetic of imperfection, incompleteness, or poverty. Wabi-sabi is a Zen Buddhist worldview that was later applied to the creation of objects characterized by external lack of ornamentation and internal refinement (wabi), as well as an emphasis on the ephemeral nature of all things, which eventually leads to decay. While Yamamoto did not formally study wabi-sabi, he is a product of his culture, which is arguably the world's most aesthetically refined.

Mature Work

As the 1980s came to a close, the initial impact of Yamamoto's designs began to fade; the designer went into a self-proclaimed decline for the next few years. However, by the mid-1990s, Yamamoto had experienced a resurgence of creativity unheard of in contemporary fashion. His work a decade earlier was vastly different in that it fully embraced the most lyrical and fleeting elements of historical modes. His designs evolved into a mash-up of street-style realism and Victorian romanticism, reshaped and reconfigured for a modern audience. Yamamoto retained his very personal vision at both ends, creating clothes for an ideal woman who, according to the couturier, does not exist.

Yamamoto's brilliant ability to recontextualize the familiar into wearable creations that came as close to works of art as any clothing designed in the early 2000s was perhaps his most powerful quality. Although he designed clothing for both men and women, it was his couture-inspired creations for women that most fully realized this concept. Yamamoto's spring 1999 collection, themed around a wedding, was one of the best fashion presentations in recent memory. The play on androgyny, as seen through an array of masculine-tailored suits; the reliance on a neutral color scheme of black, white, and khaki; and magnificent three-dimensional gowns that evoked both the Victorian era and the golden age of twentieth-century Parisian haute couture were all evident. The lyrical presentation itself added to the glory of the garments, with the highlight being a young bride performing a reverse striptease. Instead of disrobing, the mannequin, dressed in an unadorned hoop-skirted wedding gown, pulled her mantle, a pair of sandals, a hat, gloves, and, finally, a bouquet of flowers from pockets hidden in the gown. The usually jaded fashion journalists were moved to tears before giving Yamamoto a standing ovation. Following the success of this collection, he was named international designer of the year in June 2000 by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in New York City.

Yamamoto evolved further in the early 2000s. His spring 2003 collection debuted earlier that year, during the haute couture presentations, rather than during the Paris ready-to-wear fashion week in October 2002. Simultaneously, he became the designer for Y's 3, a new clothing line produced in collaboration with the Adidas sportswear company. This collaboration came about after Yamamoto designed a phenomenally successful line of trainers, athletic shoes, and sports shoes for Adidas in 2001.