Blotched by livid bruising and welted by clumsily stitched scars, Yohji Yamamoto's models seemed to have just walked shakily away from a vicious punch-up. This imprint of violence transmitted via makeup is something Yamamoto has played with before, for Spring 2013. It suited these clothes down to the ground, from ripped shoulder to twisted boot. This was a master class in sartorial butchery. Jackets and pants rippled with extraneous layers and shivered with hems wrought asunder. Some appeared to have been gleefully filleted then rebuilt, mad professor style, with the leftovers from previous victims. All this slicing and splicing exploded against the eye, but once you became desensitized to that violence, a harmony presented itself. When not black, the colors of those apparently dissected jackets were a complementary chorus of blues, greens, and mushrooms. Identical twins wore inversely colored—but not identically so—double-layered outfits. Like their wearers, these clothes bore their scars proudly and well. Nothing here was a radical departure for Yamamoto, but then surely staying precisely where he is is radical enough. Menswear teems with designers who toy again and again with the old standards. Someone who rips them up instead of ripping them off—and so beautifully, too—is to be cherished.
