The set on the runway at Yohji Yamamoto was a rectangle of thin scaffolding. Painted bright red, it suggested something sporty. As the first looks came out, the suggestion took on substance. Draped jersey dresses had a streetwise edge with flat combat boots and dip-dyed punk hair, and looked like the kind of designer riffs on athletic gear that were big in the nineties. The graphic punch of those black and red knits, wrapped a bit helter-skelter about the body, echoed Yamamoto's work at Y-3, a reference you saw last season as well.
But really, this show would seem to be about contrasts and halves, covering the body, and uncovering it to reveal…something. One long, cowled sweater had a whipstitched seam all the way up the front like a scar, and then on the turn you saw its cutaway back, with skin and pants unobscured. Elsewhere, models seemed to be instructed to hold on to their clothes, as if one false move would drop them all to the floor. Even the invite came with a curtain of sheer black fabric that had to be pulled back to get at its practical truths.
All that coy revealing leads logically to sex, which is rarely traversed territory for Yamamoto. There were corseted satin teddies under great, sturdy felted wool capes, and an exquisite lipstick dress with curved pleats like petals that fell open as the model walked, a bit like, well, you can guess what. The show ended in a strange bit of theater, with a group of skimpy spaghetti-strap frocks trimmed with stripper tassels. The models wearing them halfheartedly shimmied by a pole before taking their walk. The message? Mixed. But perhaps that's just a woman's prerogative.
