Fashion is, at heart, a reaction. A reaction to the moment in which we live, politically, culturally, economically, and also a reaction to what has come before, to history, to the history of fashion and, sometimes, to the history of a designer's own work. From that history, Yohji Yamamoto's collaboration with Adidas, later to become Y-3, was born. The designer's aesthetic, developed in Japan in the late 1970s, originally had its roots in the country's workwear, specifically men's, also in part inspired by the robustly beautiful portraiture of the photographer August Sander. Incidentally, Sander's imagery - capturing a cross-section of society in early-20th-century Germany - finds contemporary reflection in Daido Moriyama's visions of Tokyo from the 1960s to today.
Over time Yamamoto's aesthetic became less direct, more rarefied, more visibly poetic - romantic, albeit a romance specific to its creator, hence unconventional. Yohji - as Yamamoto, the man, is referred to in person by those who know and love him - once told me that he was “scared” of the red lips and bare skin of the sex workers he saw in his formative years. The enveloping, principally black or navy silhouette with which he made his name and which he took to Paris in 1981 - where, pandemic aside, he has shown ever since - is a clear response. Indeed, it proposes a diametric opposite. It is impossible to underestimate the effect these clothes had on the lives of the women who wore Yohji at that time and today, still. Fashion commentators labelled them “crows” in the first instance, yet those women saw and identified the fact that here was a designer who treated them as far more than arm candy, a man, in fact, who disliked that mode of thought intensely.
By the late 1990s, Yohji was looking more at traditional Western dress, French haute couture in particular, for inspiration. At the start of his career he openly expressed dislike for bourgeois fashion - conservative tailoring, superfluous ornamentation, high heels - preferring a dark palette that focused the attention on innovative pattern-cutting and oversized shapes, distressed fabrics and asymmetry. His work upheld the beauty of imperfection and embraced and protected the body inside. It wasn't long, though, before he
