1970s-1990s The Japanese Avant-garde

[travolta]

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[travolta]

comme des garcons s/s '9

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[MulletProof]

beautiful pics travolta, that junya collection is one of my favorites of all time.

 

[travolta]

this top looks like a watercolor fish brought to life--plays tricks with your mind...incredible

 

[brian]

beautiful pics travolta, that junya collection is one of my favorites of all time.

mine too..absolutely breathtaking, and groundbreaking...

 

[MulletProof]

 

[softgrey]

What a sublime thread. Softgrey and Mutterlein got me thinking...
Laying aside the idea of whether fashion is "art", I have great difficulty thinking of any artist who "changed the world." Leonardo, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Picasso -- they changed art, but...the world?

And yet--engineers have changed the world utterly: Franklin, Edison, Bell, Ford, Jobs.

Perhaps, by becoming an engineer, Miyake may truly realize the artist's dream of changing the world.

hi tinuvielberen!...
welcome to tFS...interesting point...
i think artists change the world in a less tangible way...they change society and cultural ideas...often presenting a different view of the world
ie-the ones you named painted a lot of things which were used to educate the masses who mostly could not read at the time...(especially about religions)

in much the same way...i think a designer can do this...pose questions and present alternative options to the accepted standards...
in many ways an article of clothing can change your life...
a shoe can change the way you walk..
a jacket can change the way you feel...

i think these designers empower women with their work...

 

[travolta]

thanks for the pics mullet. I'm glad everyone is responding to this thread--i wish i had an actual hand in the creation of these things--i'm just the in between guy!

 

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[nqth]

About Yohji Yamamoto at Interni.it

http://www.internimagazine.it/s013001000128/s013001000130/d013001000562/a013001008300.htm

 

[softgrey]

nqth...is it just me...or is that all in japanese?..

those pictures are great...the hat is like a cloud..and the print on the cape is so dark and happy at the same time...i love that...the dark and the light marrying together...creates a certain resonance...a certain vibration....like music...

travolta...those last few pics are esp wonderful...
*poor marc jacobs trying to copy these things in his last couple collections...
...not even close...imo...

 

[nqth]

Softgrey, do you mean the text? It's in English.
The cloud, yes. It's lovely. Yamamoto always does it in such a poetic way:-)

Yohji Yamamoto

edited by Cristina Morozzi

Yohji Yamamoto, whose name means ?at the foot of the mountain?, was born in Tokyo in 1943. A son of the era of defeat, obsessed by the ruins on which Japan was building its future, he was raised by his mother, a dressmaker and war widow, who worked 16 hours a day to put him through school. Against his mother's advice, he decided to follow in her footsteps, attending the Bunka school to learn the basics of the trade. In 1969 he was awarded an eight-month study trip to Paris, where he saw the first developments in pr괭୰orter and decided to follow that path.

Back in Tokyo, in 1972 he founded the Y's Company. In 1981 his first Paris show was a shock: fashion had changed direction. A new era was beginning, which would alter our perception of clothing and the female image. ?If fashion -Yamamoto, the most philosophical of fashion designers, says- is just a dress it is not indispensable. But if it is a way of relating to everyday life it becomes very important. Of all the arts, only fashion has the possibility to directly influence people. Fashion is unique, essential communication that involves the sensations experienced by people who wear the clothing they want?. His fashion is a way of being, yet Yamamoto doesn't think of himself as a designer. He prefers to call himself a tailor, or a craftsman who looks for the essence of things: ?a carpenter -he says- works with his hands to reach the essence of the chair; I do the same thing to find the essence of the dress?. Wim Wenders in the film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, aiming the camera at Yamamoto's ascetic face, his measured gestures, his monastic spaces and, through briefly, at his clothes, has distilled his philosophy.

Takeishi Kitano, the renowned Japanese filmmaker, asked him to do the costumes for the film Dolls, bringing out the ritual, almost fatal character of his fashion. Which perhaps should not even be called fashion, because Yamamoto doesn't pay attention to fashions or trends: he is interested in people, real people, like those photographed in the book People of the 20th Century by August Sander, a great source of inspiration. He has studied every detail of those images. In the film he shows them to Wim Wenders, describing not the clothing but the character of the people. On the workers' overalls he says ?they are something to be proud of, while the clothing of the gypsy speaks of disorientation, and the six-button vest of the merchant speaks of dignity. Those people -he concludes-are wearing reality, they could live their whole life wearing the same clothes?.

The clothes on display at Palazzo Pitti have been selected by Yamamoto himself based on their correspondences to the 19th-century spaces that contain them. The exhibition design by Masao Nihei, a long-time collaborator of Yamamoto, makes plenty of use of natural light entering through partially closed shutters. The clothes, always facing toward the Boboli gardens, and the artworks are never directly lit. The tones of the lights, softened by amber gels, accentuate a sort of relationship between softnesses: those of the old decorations and artworks and those of the silhouettes. The itinerary is marked by red bubbles, 23 cm in diameter, alternating with large reflecting silver disks placed near the clothes to attract attention with reflexes of light. At the end of the show's itinerary, in the Sala del Fiorino, 36 dresses are arrayed to bid farewell to the guests. In the Music Room, behind a cage made with metal pipes, there is a large bamboo skirt, four meters in diameter.

The cage is open, you can enter and touch before leaving the gallery. The dummies, similar to those immortalized by De Chirico, mingle with the visitors. The clothes seem to have entered on tiptoe, they are accessible, with an almost everyday appearance in this context. They reveal themselves, though they belong to different seasons, of today and forever. The Florentine show offered an opportunity to learn more about the secret of this timeless quality.

Fashion is ephemeral, identity is permanent: how can they be reconciled?
?I don't like the word identity. I don't like to be told I've been understood. The identity of my clothes is that of the person who chooses them. Leaving something unfinished permits a new approach to events. The key to any creation is to leave it incomplete?. (...)

 

[runner]

there is a key word to conceptual aspects of Japanese culture, "Fueki-Ryukou".
this is a way of thinking by Bashou Matsuo (1644-94), a haiku poet who is still influential in Japan. this archaic Japanese is familiar to creative people in particular, and some of them set to work, perfectly conscious of it. once CDG quoted it in their announcement too.
"Fueki" is almost equivalent for everlasting or unchanging thing while "Ryukou" is for everchanging thing, fashion. just like the quote from Yohji in softgrey's post #193, "I sing the same song, even if the melody is different every time."


roughly translated extract from "bashou-numon"

then, Bashou explained to Hokushi about "Fueki-Ryukou" in haiku.
this is the idea: beyond the times, schools and means, something immutable and constant lies at the root of all kinds of art. something like the essence of art. that's Fueki.
but Fueki will make its appearance in the fashion, being continuously transformed through the times, schools and means.
the underlying thing, which is absolute and essential, should be above the times. masterpieces should all have something in common. it could be called the Divine or the Absolute.
but it is abstract. therefore, when expressed in the concrete, it will have corporeality characteristic of each time and each creator. if anything, it will get to be realized only after a new idea at the forefront of the time and an original expression of the creator.
namely Fueki, the essence, truly appears in the latest fashion.

the definite consciousness of that way of thinking might make the difference between the Belgians and the Japanese. it seems to me that what some of Japanese designers are trying to do is make clothes carry "Fueki" as hard as they could rather than just design new clothes in every collection.
I think of it when I see something very serious or even unearthly in their clothes.

 

[Estella*]

^that's interesting, runner, thank you!

from www.photography-now.com

about "may i help you?" an exhibition of photographers who have worked
with yamamoto...sorry if this has been posted already!

Yohji Yamamoto: May I help you? provides a chance to look back on Yamamoto's work through the works of eight photographers, all of whom have produced "visual" photographs for the Yohji Yamamoto catalogue and other materials related to the designer from 1984 to the present. The monochromatic photographs from Max Vadukul, who was active from the beginning, show out-of-the-ordinary images with Manhattan as a backdrop, while the photos of Paolo Roversi depict androgynous people with canes in both hands. These are two examples of the unique style and individual creativity of each photographer. Free from the influence of Yamamoto's style, the photographs that they create are, so to speak, free "visual" interpretations of the designer and his work.

"Fashion is only complete when it is worn by ordinary people who exist now, managing their lives, loving and grieving." (quoted from Yohji Yamamoto, Talking to myself)

Yamamoto possesses both a spirit of rebellion and great magnanimity. In the same way that his clothes are completed through the personal arrangement of each individual, this exhibition will be finally completed when it is viewed by each individual through the interpretations of Yohji Yamamoto provided by photographers.

 

[softgrey]

runner..thank you for that...

so fueki is some intangible essence that all art has...
some indefinable thing that lies beneath the surface?...the thing that makes it 'art'
am i understanding this...?

thanks for the translation nqth-for some reason it came up japanese for me...
i agree-poetic is a good way to describe yohji's work...maybe that's fueki?...

 

[travolta]

soft you may be interested in this
http://www.moa-inter.or.jp/english/setsugekka/setsu-kurita.html

 

[softgrey]

thanks travolta...i got about halfway through...i have to come back to it...
can't absorb it all at once...