Acknowledged master tailor though he is, Yohji Yamamoto's suits don't often hew too closely to the male form. He slimmed down his silhouette a bit for last season's eighteenth-century fantasia, but for Fall, he's back in bigger-is-better mode, opening with soft, slouchy suiting that recalled nothing so much as David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. Pants were wide, full, and rolled at the ankle, and jackets big enough that many featured straps or belts, loosely tying them together. It was as if the clothes were hanging on to their wearers for dear life—though Yamamoto being the craftsman he is, you knew that they weren't.
They radiated a kind of perverse comfort, those rumpled two- and three-piecers, especially in their sumptuous fabrics. That's a proposition not often heard round these parts: the suit as security blanket. Certainly some of Yamamoto's typically wide-ranging cast included those who looked in need of a little bit of comfort—his elderly gents have a dignity their young counterparts can't match, but a bit of a shopworn sadness about them, too. The designer pulls no punches: A series of very cool sweaters decorated with skeletal bones made for knit memento mori. But if Yohji is clear-eyed about the inevitable, he's also sanguine about life's pleasures. He wrapped several of his men in long velvet robes printed with vintage erotica.
