Backstage after tonight's show, 68-year-old, soft-voiced Yohji Yamamoto was raising the clarion call to the youth of the world. "I felt, in this moment, we need flower power," he said. "But at the same time, we need young people's anger."
Of course, even something like anarchic rebellion has a uniform, and so Yamamoto carried forward his ominous punk sensibility from Spring. But this time around there was a lightness to it, starting with a high, cotton-candy swirl of hair that looked like Marie Antoinette on the Bowery, and also present in fragile, webby knits and photo-printed black mesh with negative images of flowers, cut into gauzy layers. But, speaking of the most famous fashionista of the eighteenth century, the mood was further uplifted by Yamamoto's perennial love of historical fashion. The designer took a romantic turn with hoop skirts, either half-covered or with their cage structure fully revealed, that were sort of twisted and turned up, as if the wind had just caught them. The best was covered with black lace, worn with a kimono-sleeve Victorian velvet jacket.
For all its rabble-rousing, grassroots sentiment, this felt like Yamamoto in a more optimistic mood than we've seen in a few seasons. Perhaps he knows something we don't about the future, or maybe he just believes in it.
