Parlaying with Yohji Yamamoto post-show is one of the great pleasures of the Paris menswear season. Today a reshuffled schedule, a perfect storm of traffic prompted by the UEFA Euro ’16 Football games and a demonstration (ah, the French), plus a serious chunk of distance between this show and the next precluded that possibility. The only compensation was that you could almost hear Yamamoto’s richly rascally, cigarette-raspy tones narrating the like-the-man archetypes who sidled up and down his runway.
On strapped sneakers, slippers, or 12-hole Dr. Martens, Yamamoto’s men trod a fine line between heroic and derelict. Their heads, wrists, and ankles were bandaged with different colored dressings. Some had impressive augmented facial hair that seemed to have run as wild as a forgotten garden in midsummer. The silhouettes shifted between soft-shouldered long boxy jackets over wide high pants which sometimes had a half-apron front, and even longer jackets, coats really, over longer trousers changed at the angle. Shirts were long and loose. Pockets appeared in unconventional but still functional positions, rearranged by the suggestion of past violence like the nose of a boxer is altered by its reality. Yamamoto’s illustrations first manifested themselves in the emblem “Yohjis for hire” on the back of a pale loose canvas blazer. The next one, through the soft fold of its silky undulations, seemed to beseech: “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?”
These tough guys looking for love—or hawking it—continued to stroll their patch. Yamamoto layered long- and short-sleeved collared shorts over each other, complemented by more bandages. At the end we got a series of long fluid overcoats that looked to be overprinted in the silhouette of YY brushstrokes. The bearded and battered men wore these to the photographers, paused three-quarters of the way backstage, then stopped to shrug off their coats and return to the pit. These were souvenir overcoats. On the inside (now outside) were more YY self portraits. The audience loved it. Were Yamamoto’s archetypes scarred by war or by love? By the end one suspected the latter.
