Yohji Yamamoto is tired. This is completely understandable considering that the Japanese designer is 76 and has been working in the fashion business for over 40 years. It is also hard not feeling tired when you consider the rhythms of the modern fashion industry, radically different from the times when Yamamoto started his adventure.
Usually when people are exhausted, when someone feels their energies are drained, they stop caring and fighting. But Yamamoto reacted differently to his spiritual exhaustion: rather than giving up hopes, he decided to become a bit irreverent and to channel his anger and naughtiness into his A/W 20 menswear collection.
Showcased yesterday during the men's shows in Paris, the collection had a theme - "partisan" - a role Yamamoto felt he has taken after realising he was angry at the state of fashion today, and felt the time had come to express his anger not just through clothes, but also through words.
The theme was introduced by the runway invitation that featured a French partisan - a woman - clenching a fist against the Nazis. Yamamoto has always been fascinated by black and white images of ordinary people, like the ones collected in a book he cherishes - Auguste Sander's lifelong photography project Man of the Twentieth Century.
While shooting his documentary about Yamamoto, "Notebook on Cities and Clothes", Wim Wenders asked the designer what fascinated him about these photographs. "In them we can find real men, or real women, human beings, wearing the reality," Yamamoto replied. "Wearing not the clothing, but wearing the reality. In there, there is my kind of ideal of clothes. Because people don't consume the clothing. People can live a life with these clothes (…) I want to make something like that."
The designer then went on to explain to the director that, at the beginning of the 19th century, for those who weren't born in a wealthy family a thick coat in winter was like a friend, it was like a member of their family because it made the wearer warm and comfortable. "I feel a strong jealousy: If people can wear my things in that way, then I could be so happy," he concluded in that documentary.
This lesson (and the benefit of owning just one good piece of design in your wardrobe that can become your loyal companion through life rather than for the next three months) came to mind during the A/W 20 runway.
Darkness prevailed, but also soft drapes and deconstructed garments: the highlights were the ample coats that you know will be forever stylish, because they are not trendy but timeless.
Yamamoto layered a series of garments underneath these coats, constructing soft shells, adding military touches or decorative elements such as long metallic chains, frog fastenings and yarns used to create random embroideries that seemed to unravel on the fabric as the models walked.
Patchworked elements unbalanced the linearity of severe military tailoring; dungarees called to mind workwear, while anger materialised in asymmetric coats that elegantly destabilised the linearity of classic menswear, via fraying sweaters, coats embellished with the slogan "Naughty Yohji" and in the blood red shade that injected pure punk rage in some of the designs.
There was also a little bit of history in the collection: colourful silk scarves seemed to sprout from the lining of the jackets in a romantic way and Japanese artist Suzume Uchida (who collaborated in previous Yamamoto menswear collections coming up with illustrations of her enigmatic ghost-like women and monsters that have become very popular with a younger generation of Yamamoto fans), created this time images of women wearing stage costumes that were used for the lining of some of the designs.
These references are directly linked with the Edo period: at the time sumptuary law stated that people couldn't wear bright colours. So people created a sort of invisible fashion or "uramasari", opting for gorgeous and luxurious patterns in the lining of their garments that so became the locus for self-expression.
August Sander once stated about his portraits, "I wish to give neither a critique nor a description of these people, but only to create a piece of contemporary history with my pictures, a little romance in a materialistic age." In a way Yamamoto is doing the same with his designs, creating contemporary history through timeless clothes, spreading a little bit of sartorial romance in an age in which quantity has replaced quality. And if in this case romance is tinged with anger, so be it, genuine rebels are desperately needed in the current fashion industry.
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