Yohji wear
here is an interview from 2001- the season when he launched the adidas x yohji yamamoto which ld to the creation of Y-3...
Part 1
The Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto is famous for changing the face of fashion forever with his uncompromisingly avant-garde aesthetic - so what is he doing producing trainers for Adidas?
Susan Irvine travels to Tokyo
BY
Susan Irvine | 18 September 2001
IT is with some trepidation that I step into the Yohji Yamamoto shop on Conduit Street in London. Yohji (never 'Yamamoto' in fashionspeak) is no ordinary designer. No one vulgar or merely famous wears his clothes. You don't get Posh Spice or even Gwyneth Paltrow turning up at events in a Yohji wooden balldress fastened with nuts and bolts, or an asymmetric frock-coat of obscurely textured fabric. His clients are architects, choreographers, avant-garde film directors - subject matter for the South Bank Show.
It's like Gormenghast in the shop. Blighted. Practically every item of clothing is black or inky blue. With his fellow-Japanese designer, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Yohji established black as the fashion statement colour in 1981. Until then, apart from le smoking and 'the little black dress' there were few black clothes for women. But by the mid-1980s, thanks to Yohji and Comme des Garçons, working women everywhere were building their wardrobes round black. In Japan Yohji fans became known as 'the black crows'.
'Bag lady' was the other innovation of these Japanese designers. Instead of basing clothes on the shape of the body, they made volumes that defied it or treated it as just another shape. Instead of jackets and skirts, Yohji designs bunches, convolutions and drapes that flop round the hangers in unfathomable layers. This autumn, after many seasons of a more romantic style, he has returned to full-scale challenge. In the shop, I gather up great loops and coils of melancholy and shuffle to the changing-room.
For his current collection,
Yohji has collaborated with the sportswear giant Adidas . Coming from anyone else this would elicit loud yawns throughout the fashion world; designers have been massively influenced by sportswear since the mid-1980s. But , and I see why. He has taken the hackneyed theme of go-faster stripes and tracksuit shapes and created something genuinely new.
I slip into a skirt. It is long, made of black silk and has a ribbed wool waistline like a sweater collar that slips down the hips in an asymmetric line. It is beautiful, caressing, practical. Next I try on a tracksuit top with a wizened arm set not into the shoulder but into a circle plonked further down the body. It should look art-student pretentious; instead it's arresting. Yohji has also used sportswear fabrics in unexpected places. There is a coat with a familiar black nylon mesh on the lapels. It nags at me until I realise what it is: the stuff used to line men's swimming trunks.
I also pick up what looks like a white wrap shirt. I try to fasten it across the front. I turn it backwards and slide it on like a fencing jacket. Nothing works. I stick my head out of the curtain and flag down a busy saleswoman.
'I can't figure this out,' I say. 'Put things on the way you least expect them to go,' she rasps, hurrying off. 'I've done that. I've got it on backwards.' She swivels with an exasperated look. 'Backwards and upside down,' she says. Yohji, after all, is the designer whose clothes come with sets of drawings to show you what goes where.
Backwards and upside down, the shirt forms a crunchy puff tied with two ratty strings. It looks like some ancient washerwoman's rag. It costs £200. But then it is the only washerwoman's rag in the world that can confer an unexpected and quiet beauty on your body.
'Dolls? this is what many men like women to be. Just dolls,' says Yohji, who is sipping black coffee and smoking a Hi-Lite in his Tokyo showroom. Before setting off to meet him, I had been told by fashion insiders that he was, variously, a Lothario, a Zen monk, and a practical joker. Several women warned me that he is the sexiest man alive. Further researches provided the information that he sings with a rock band, loves gambling and fast cars, and has three children by two different women.
Yohji's clothes are often accused of being unsexy. He admits to hating the exposure, the body-hugging silhouette, the high heels of the obviously sexy look. He finds women dressed like that 'terrifying, genuinely scary'.
Everything about his aesthetic, he explains, goes back to his mother, Sumi. 'I was born in 1943. I was a baby of bomb.' (His English is good but idiosyncratic.) 'Tokyo was ruined. There was nothing. I had only my mother.' His father was killed in the War. In Notebook on Clothes and Cities, a film the German director Wim Wenders made about him in 1989, Yohji says that for him the War isn't over; it's still raging inside him. 'My mother made up her mind not to get married again. So many War widows did that. They were saying, "I am going to devote myself to my son." It was tough for my mother. She was a neighbourhood dressmaker. She had to work 16 hours a day. And I felt it was not very fair, so naturally I started thinking, "What is? a woman?"'
The Yamamotos' neighbourhood was full of '"charming girls", beautiful women wearing always this sort of look [he delineates a curvy silhouette with his hands]. I looked at them and I didn't feel nothing. Because my mother was wearing working wear all the time. Her fashion was very natural for me.' He chuckles, looking into thin air and pleading with an imaginary 'charming girl': 'Please - hide it!' he says.
Yohji won a place to read law at Keio University in Tokyo. His mother had scrimped and saved to send him. But 'after studying, studying, studying, I felt empty. Very empty.' Nevertheless, it must have been hard for him to pluck up the courage to abandon law and to say to his mother, 'Can I help you? In your shop?' Mrs Yamamoto was angry. Here she was, proud of her young son, bereft of any other man, and he wanted to give up the hard-won education that symbolised his manhood and hang round her apron strings, working alongside 'the sewing girls'.
'I wanted to be like the man in The Hairdresser's Husband,' he says. In that French film a small-town nobody falls in love with a hairdresser and she with him. He just sits around, watching her cut hair all day, filled with love. Then one day, because he knows he can never be happier than this, he kills himself. 'I just wanted to be there with her, guarding her, awaiting and proving how I felt for her.' He shrugs. 'I'm dreaming about it still.' His mother, now in her eighties, still lives in Tokyo. She has worked with Yohji down the years. Though it is rare to hear a grown man, let alone a straight man, talk about his love for his mother like this, it doesn't sound weird - it sounds touching and truthful. And it is interesting that the profound, and in many ways feminist, changes Yohji has wrought on two decades of fashion should have grown from his respect for and experience of the single working mother.
Mrs Yamamoto insisted that if Yohji was going to work with her, he had to learn how to cut clothes. And in 1966 he enrolled as a dress-making student at Bunka Mura, Tokyo's respected fashion college. There he realised that by entering competitions to sketch outfits he could make money. 'I entered maybe seven or eight. I got money! So naturally I began to swerve into this road.' It was only while preparing the final contest at Bunka Mura that he made the firm choice to become a fashion designer and not a dressmaker. He won first prize, a round-the-world trip.
Yohji set off for Paris, but didn't take the traditional route. He crossed the Sea of Japan to Siberia, crossed Russia by train and came down from the north. In Paris he felt he had come home. He describes a very male city.
'I like the smell of Gitanes. I like real old French men going [he puts on a Gitane- ravaged voice], "Haw, eh? Voilà!? Allez!" Male. And dirty. Lovely dirty.'
He stayed for a year, unable to speak more than a few phrases of French, and knew no one. 'I was sinking into a black hole,' he says, his head sagging over his cigarette. 'Depression! I couldn't talk to anyone, so I talked to myself.' He was, he says, lost in every way. He had studied fashion in the late 1960s, in the last days when haute-couture ruled, but in Paris in the early 1970s, with the advent of prêt-à-porter, everything was different.
'Twice a week I took sketches of clothes to magazines and to big stores,' he recalls. 'Some people were gentle and warm. Others were hard.' Did anyone ever accept the sketches? 'No,' he says, firmly. Paris was not interested.
So he returned to Tokyo, and for almost three years helped his mother in her business. But he dreamed of creating his own clothes. His first idea was men's clothes for women; he was inspired by old French war movies starring actresses in army uniform.
'I found that so sexy. The body is protected. And covered. In a very hard way. And so you are forced to ask yourself: "What's inside? What is her skin like? What texture? What colour?" I was? seducted. When you are ordered to wear something, when you have no freedom, then your sexuality becomes stronger.' Because of the restriction, the repression?
I ask. 'Yeah!' he shoots a sly grin.'This became my basic idea of fashion for women.'
For seven years Yohji worked on his own lines of clothes, selling them in Japan. Then in 1981, along with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, he was invited to show in Paris. It's hard, now, to understand the shock value of those shows. Kawakubo, Yohji's girlfriend in the early 1980s, has always been the more severely avant-garde of the two designers. To the sound of a magnified heartbeat, she sent out models in shapeless bags decorated with burnt-edged holes. Yohji chose the sound of silence. His models looked like manic depressives who had been on a rampage through an obese person's wardrobe. There were military details, great flapping folds of fabric, sombre colours. The models stomped out flat-footed. The reaction was bafflement boiling over into outrage. A third of the audience got up and left.
'It was Hiroshima look? baggy? dirty? terrible,' chuckles Yohji, remembering the press reaction, 'Sayonara!' Back then, fashion was still dominated by a bourgeois French ideal of style. Smart little jackets and skirts, chic accessories, pretty print dresses? It was this kind of 'good taste' European style that Yohji and his mother had been copying for years for their neighbourhood clients.
Though his collection was interpreted as nihilistic, post-punk destructiveness and deliberate ugliness, it changed fashion forever. By the mid-1980s, without having heard of Yohji Yamamoto, I was wandering round college in a long black baggy dress, flat ankle boots and a big felt hat that obscured half of my face. In a 1997 book on the designer, the French fashion journalist François Baudot compares, only a little pretentiously to British ears, Yohji's approach with that of Arte Povera, the Italian art movement of the 1960s that rejected superficially shiny and attractive surfaces in favour of humble substances like coal, rags, mud and wood shavings. 'Yohji Yamamoto? was one of a small number of designers who tried to break away from a fossilised conception of what clothes were,' writes Baudot.
ink: But you can download the UHQ images via the download button in the lower right on the page.
...
...
