Tonight backstage, Yohji Yamamoto once again alluded to the passing of his fashion “rivals,” and that this continues to stir up loneliness in him. After all, rivalry, even when partnered with friendship, is an excellent stimulus for creators (i.e., the entire Renaissance). Yamamoto might not come across as competitive, yet this collection confirmed that he knows how to pick his battles; for in the absence of his peers, he took on certain notions of time. “I wanted to fight with the 19th century before the 21st century,” he explained.
Given his avant-garde vision—the masterful execution, the implicit vulnerability—the past 20 years of fashion must seem prosaic compared to the prospect of corsets and crinolines. And so he adapted their functions and forms to his melancholic silhouettes: off-center lacing on the outside of a coat or up a sleeve, raw-edged or openwork skirts draped like petticoats, and hats stacked with dramatic flair. There were haphazard placements of pleating and ruffles that conveyed a romantic spin on punk. There were larger volumes composed of complex layers and single layers with buttoning systems that produced complex volumes. Padded coats were modeled on historical silhouettes, as though the models had simply rolled out of bed and morphed their duvets into avant-garde period pieces. Several boasted painterly gestures, from graffiti-like tags to abstract brushstrokes. They were gorgeous—and true to Yamamoto’s talents, they impressed from all angles.
Lately, Yamamoto has been expressing his concern for the climate, his fascination with millennials, and other externally driven observations. This collection, by contrast, felt like a deliberate return to his undone elegance from the late ’80s, newly treated with the vigor of someone undeterred by mortality. Lacking an explanation of the final look—an anomaly of matted, painted wool in opulent color—we could assign any number of meanings or none at all. The point is that Yamamoto will be iterating until the end and almost always in black, which signifies so much. “Endless repetition and the study of the classics. After that, one can topple the establishment. It is just the same as waging a war,” he wrote in My Dear Bomb, an autobiography-cum-manifesto published 10 years ago. “The classics stand the test of time.” Yes, dear Yohji-san, yours certainly will.
