In 1969 Yamamoto won a fashion prize at college to travel to Paris. 'It was the exact moment when ready-to-wear was blossoming,' he says. He had studied the great masters of couture at school - Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel - and suddenly it all seemed irrelevant. 'I felt I was totally useless. I was sinking… to the bottom of the River Seine.' He spent his nine months trying to sell his fashion sketches to magazines but he didn't sell a single one. 'It was very tough training,' he recalls. 'The disappointment was very hard.'
He returned to Tokyo at 26, as he describes, 'a kind of good-looking boy' with new dreams and aspirations. He could have continued to make a living working at his mother's shop, but he began planning his own line of ready to wear. One of these collections - made up only of raincoats - attracted the attention of Japanese buyers and they began to order from him. Did your mother encourage you, I ask, wondering how she felt to be losing her talented son from her shop. 'I have no memory about that. She might have been very anxious. Hmm. She is on the third floor, ask her.'
Now 94 and dressed in an unassuming black jumper with black trousers and a smart but not 'designery' jacket and comfortable-looking black leather loafers, Fumi Yamamoto welcomes me with cups of real lemonade and jelly sweets, laid out neatly on lace doilies before us. She has devoted her life to her son. After the war in Japan, life was grim, particularly for a widowed mother. She recalls taking a rucksack into the countryside on the outskirts of Tokyo to forage for food. It is unimaginable now - particularly when I see her later being driven home in the back of a shiny limo - but then, life was simply about survival.
Fumi pushed her son to do well at school, and supported him financially. She was convinced enough about her son's talent to sell her own shop to help him to open his in 1972. He even took on one of her loyal employees, Takayuki Kurihara. He still works as Yamamoto's pattern chief. Fumi's salary stopped when the new investment team stepped in, though she keeps her driver and continues to travel with the team to Paris for the womenswear shows twice a year where she makes sure
everyone is happy and cooks for Yohji and the team (one of her specialities is a type of Japanese omelette made with layers of egg).
Yamamoto launched his Y's collection in Japan in 1977 and had an established business when he went to Paris to show in 1981. 'The wind was blowing,' he says. 'I had a map of Japan on the wall and I had a pin for each city where I had a connection with a shop.' Within three years, most of Japan was covered. 'And then, well, why not? Open a shop
in Paris. The idea came.' Sure enough, despite the unsupportive fashion press, he opened his shop in Paris on rue du Cygne in the first arrondissement in 1981. And the customers - women who discovered a new way of dressing overnight - began to buy, and haven't stopped since.
Today, his business back on track, Yamamoto employs about 70 people. It takes at least three years to become an assistant. 'There is a freedom here,' he says. 'But freedom is very heavy, it carries responsibility. And that freedom to create something is hell. There is no excuse. The clothes, the finish of the clothes tells everything - how they love, how they eat, how they spend time - the clothes don't lie.'
The core members of the design team, including his right-hand man, Tadashi Kubo, sit outside Yamamoto's office. At one point while we are being shown around the studio, Kubo springs up from his chair and pulls out one of the thousands of brown manila envelopes that line the studio. It's a folded pattern from the mid-1980s. The entire archive of more than 30 years' work is here on paper. He shows us the pattern cutters, working amid apparent chaos of long rolls of pattern cutting paper, and then the fabrics in every weight, texture and shade of black and grey imaginable. Then, with a glint in his eye, he opens a door into a small room packed from floor to ceiling with rails of clothes. This is the inspiration room, where Yamamoto's eclectic collections of old clothes - many rare and unusual army and navy uniforms - are kept. It is the designer's own museum.
'I have been collecting so many secondhand clothes for 30 years,' Yamamoto says. 'Army uniforms are made with special thread, for certain specific reasons - for the fight, or for protection. Ordinarily you cannot order those types of fabrics. There is no ornament; everything is necessary.' He refers to these clothes - a mad mix of the military and the folk, traditional clothing from around the world and through different periods of time - to recreate a particular fabric, or to be inspired by the cut of a jacket. There is an honesty about these clothes that he likes.
For Yamamoto the starting point of a new collection can be fairly abstract. How does a collection begin? 'I start speaking. Like last time, I started talking to my pattern maker, maybe I said "Hey, I'm treated like a master and I hate it, so I know you are very highly technically experienced, but please forget it. Don't make perfect. I want to be like a young designer starting out, so don't repeat your high quality. You have to break your experience, forget your experience." I started this time in that way, and for the fabric team I started, "Hey, I'm going to do psychedelic print and accessories" - which I hated for a long time. And then they struggle to see how I am feeling, what I'm thinking, and there is a ping-pong.'
Every garment will be shown to Yamamoto 10 or more times (it is usual for a designer to make changes to a toile three or four times), for fittings that last for days at a time, as he cuts into the fabric, drapes, pins and creates on the body; each piece of clothing is a process from the fabric itself to the pattern cutting to the fittings, the embroideries (it's not always all plain and black), and finally the finished product.
Everything is made in Japan, and often pieces are finished by hand as part of a cottage industry keeping alive the arts and crafts of the country's traditional textiles business. It is about as far away from industrialised fast fashion as is possible to be. While the design and cutting is done in Tokyo, every one of Yamamoto's fabrics is made specially in Kyoto at the family-run Chiso factory, which was established in 1555, when it made garments for monks, and has been producing Japan's finest ceremonial kimonos for decades. A single kimono can take up to one year to produce, using up to 15 artisan processes along the way.
It is an extraordinary relationship - a 21st-century operation that can connect Yamamoto with a dying breed of artisans capable of the finest craftsmanship. Here, in the suburbs of Kyoto, up impossibly narrow, steep staircases is a kimono painter, Mr Kimura, who sits down at his workshop table every day, using a rice paste to stop the colours seeping into each other, working 10-hour days to produce five or six kimonos a month. It was this ancient Yuzen technique that was used to create the extraordinary oversize kimonos Yamamoto designed for his friend Takeshi Kitano's poetic 2002 film, Dolls .
Here, too, are the embroiderers, only three of them, in a sun-filled room, their sharp eyes focusing on millions of often microscopic stitches in the most exquisite shiny silk thread that appears to have been spun like candyfloss. A single kimono takes 12 days to embroider in this way. This workshop, at the top of another steep staircase, is run by Mr Murayama. He hand-dyes his own threads now because the supplies are no longer available in the subtle range of colours he requires. When Yamamoto needed special embroideries for costumes for Elton John's Red Piano tour in 2003, this is where they were done. The samples are still in the archive - silky spiders, and silver and gold safety pins so heavily worked that they look almost three-dimensional and real.
For special projects, when money is no object, Yamamoto can indulge in using the craftsmanship he loves. But it is surprising when I am taken to visit a machine embroiderer in a block of flats on the outskirts of Kyoto, who is busy working on sections of jackets for the spring/summer 2011 Yohji Yamamoto menswear collection. Mrs Yamagata, who has been sewing like this for 40 years, is stitching bright motifs on 60 jackets, each badge taking 15 minutes, deftly moving the fabric freestyle, without a foot to keep it in place, around the needle of the sewing machine. These hand-finished jackets will go on sale this spring for £1,870. Mrs Yamagata reminds me of how Fumi Yamamoto would once have worked, sewing away at home to make a living for herself and her only son.
For Fumi, the hard work and investment have paid off. She is proud of her son, as well as her granddaughter, Limi Yamamoto, 35, whose label Limi Feu was launched in 1999 from the ground floor of Yamamoto's HQ. She works completely separately to her father but the aesthetic is dark, androgynous and unmistakably Yamamoto. She has not had to fight the battles her father did. He paved the way for her generation. The product of Yamamoto's first marriage, Limi has an older brother, Yuji, who works on the commercial side of a multi-brand fashion company in Japan, and a teenage stepbrother, from Yamamoto's current partner, who has worked with him for 25 years.
While Yamamoto is downbeat about the future, the V&A exhibition will surely give him a boost. To relax, he likes to gamble, and there is a dartboard outside his office. He has written some new song lyrics as part of My Dear Bomb , but says he is not making music at the moment. 'I have no time,' he says. He also likes to draw and paint and will be doing a painting in situ at the V&A the day before the opening. 'This one or two years has been very, very tough and busy so I hope I'm coming back to my physical life: creating of course, and taking care of business, and taking care of myself. Like doing stretching exercises. Hopefully, a healthy life.'
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