On one of the long coats on Yohji Yamamoto's menswear S/S 18 runway there was a print of a drawing portraying a woman ready to chew on something, her lips slightly curled in a scary expression, the sort of smile a cannibal may give you.
The illustration is by Japanese artist Suzume Uchida and, if you check her site, you will discover the full portrait, and understand its meaning a bit better: the woman is actually eating her own entrails that are spilling out of her body.
The work is not inspired by a horror story, but could be used as the perfect definition for fashion: it is indeed entitled "Anorexia and Destruction" and somehow this title perfectly defines what we have seen so far on the latest menswear runways.
Ripping ideas off each others and revomiting the past without even updating it has indeed become the favourite sport of the fashion industry, as if the latter was eating itself in a sad continuous vicious circle.
The final message at the end of most catwalk shows seems indeed to be "increase the sales" rather than "offer something desirable to the consumers".
On Yohji Yamamoto's runway things were a bit different, though, as the designer let his clothes speak. He did so in three different ways: through details he scattered in his tailored pieces; via prints and illustrations, and through strips of fabrics attached to a garment and printed with slogans in English and Japanese.
In the first case he tweaked the lapels of jackets and coats, reshaping them with a botanical theme: leaves unbalanced with their forms the perfect geometry of the designs in a casual way and in some garments they even fell in the exact place where a pocket should have been.
Zips were also employed as decorative and functional elements on black jackets and one jacket seemed to integrate a large backpack.
For what regards the prints, Yamamoto turned to a painter's studio, adding splashes of paint, casual patterns and graffiti scribbles to his suits.
The designer then added portraits of actress Eiko Koike on the back of biker jackets and enlisted the help of Japanese artist Suzume Uchida for the portraits of ghost-like women replicated on the long shirts and coats that closed the show.
A graduate from the Department of Art and Design at the University of Tsukuba, Uchida favours drawings in ink, watercolours and oilcolours in which she plays with lights and shadows creating spooky chiaroscuoro effects such as in her works "Pinky Swear" or "Red Fruit".
There was an undeniable sense of doom in some of the garments decorated with such prints, but the designer pointed at vitality and enregy via the suits that "spoke", thanks to messages, slogans and titles of Toshiyuki Horie's books carved out of the velvet devoré fabrics or printed on the bands of fabrics appliqued on shirts and jackets that read "Too old to die", "I'm gifted" and "No clothes to wear".
Maybe Yamamoto had gone all serious, or maybe he was being ironic, after all some of the slogans featured occasional spelling/grammar mistakes. What's for sure is that he built a credible wardrobe: the collection still revolved around the basic pieces of the male wardrobe, but shirts, jackets and pants were reinvented thanks to Yamamoto's will to play with volumes.
Conceptually speaking, the final fluid robes that liquidly fell on the models' bodies could be interpreted as shrouds and therefore they maybe hinted at the possibility of rebirth; it is actually worth remembering that two of the themes of the collection were Buddhism and reincarnation.
From a commercial point of view, you can expect quite a few women will maybe buy or borrow these pieces and wear them as dresses: in a way the garments remind us that, while nowdays the adjective "genderless" is on everybody's lips, Yamamoto had gone down this path a long time ago. Inviting a female artist to contribute to a menswear collection (like Fendi has done for the next season) with her portraits of rather scary women strengthened Yamamoto's passion for walking the thin line between feminine and masculine styles.
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