Yohji Yamamoto
Autumn/Winter 2001-2002

Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear Collection

March 2, 2024
Vogue
Written by Nicole Phelps

There was no music to accompany the models as the Yohji Yamamoto show began. With only the sound of their feet gliding down the raised wooden runway and the camera shutters clicking, the dim hush allowed for reflection on how different the Yohji experience is from the rest of fashion—with no paid-to-be-there celebrities and no paparazzi throngs. Not that Yamamoto, who is now 80 and who has been putting on runway shows for over 40 years, was lacking for notable attendees. Diana Widmaier Picasso and Klaus Biesenbach sat in the front row, near the French artist Orlan, the musician Warren Ellis (who walked the designer’s men’s runway a month ago), and the milliner Stephen Jones.

To start, the collection was all black. The details disappear against the background in these images, but there was nothing flat about Yamamoto’s designs. The coats, dresses, and suits were all embellished with collapsing squares of various kinds, like walking cubist sculptures. Widmaer Picasso’s grandfather, in his cubist period, depicted his subjects from many different perspectives, putting them in deeper, richer, and more complicated context. Yamamoto was up to something related here. Certainly, the woman who wears one of these pieces on the street will get a double-take.

Moving along, he played with the similar geometric shapes and volumes in mismatched red and black plaids, or with pinstripes, checks, and tweeds that had a substantial hand-hewn look. In at least one case, one of the larger squares came with a zipper for stowing potential necessities, but function seemed not the point of these experiments. Utility is not what drives Yamamoto as a designer; if his pieces weave themselves into their wearer’s lives it’s for other more esoteric and emotional reasons.

Backstage Yamamoto was his usual blend of attentiveness and elusiveness, nodding his head at questions, but providing only short answers. Was he referencing cubism? “Yes.” Looking at Picasso? Actually, “Braque.”

To conclude, he sent out a group of five muted gray suits and coats. From the front, these looked like a rejection of the imaginative, experimental constructions that came before, with only pyramidal shoulders adding visual interest. Au contraire. Unfortunately for those witnessing the show only on screen, the front of those looks tells just half of the story. As the models made their way back down the runway, they paused to pose and show off the lavish bustles—more organic than Braque’s cubist geometries—that decorated their backsides.

As it happens, at the Pompidou, there is a black coat dress with a red bustle from a 1989 Yamamoto collection on display in Laurence Benaim’s affecting “La traverse des apparences” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Which brings it back to Stephen Jones. As he waited to say his hello to Yamamoto, the famous hatmaker remarked: “It’s so interesting to see all those things other people have taken over the years from him, but actually see him doing them.” Including many contemporary designers today. “It just looks so fresh.”

Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear: A Seamless Parable on Cubism

March 1, 2024
WWD
Written by Lily Templeton

The Japanese designer let his instinct and tailoring skills loose on suits, outerwear and utility garments.

You could have heard a pin drop at Yohji Yamamoto in the silence that accompanied his opening black-clad models. Not that you did: the Japanese designer is a master tailor and there’d be nothing amiss, pins or otherwise.

But that first group directed the focus toward the protruding cubes that made the impeccable classic cut of a greatcoat jagged at the shoulders or created a bustle effect under the back of a jacket.

A key to Yamamoto’s fall season had been offered in his invitation. On the glossy side, matte print gave the details of his show. The other side was matte, which made the outline of a Cubist-style profile stand out starkly.

Backstage, when asked why he’d been thinking about that art movement, the designer replied in his inimitable deadpan: “I don’t know, I was just inspired.”

But considering the times we live in, it wasn’t hard to draw a parallel with the epoch in which “Guernica,” arguably one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous works, was born: economic crises, the rise of extremisms and nationalisms, a global geopolitical chessboard on the brink.

Rather than canvas and paint, Yamamoto’s medium is fabric and more than ever, it felt like he let his instinctual side take the wheel. Case in point: He said he couldn’t talk about how he’d arrived at these silhouettes. “During fittings, I can change, I can touch,” he said with finality.

So there were the trappings of the world as we know it, with its suits, its dresses, the outerwear, the utility garments, their shapes slowly distorted as they are dissected into cubic units.

Friday in Paris: Yohji Yamamoto, Victoria Beckham and Vêtements

March 2, 2024
Fashion Network
Written by Godfrey Deeny

[…]

Yohji Yamamoto: Cubist cool in City Hall

Well now, there is nothing quite like a seeing a great collection by a real designer, such as Yohji Yamamoto on Friday night in Paris. 

By real designer, we mean someone capable of creating a unique look and silhouette; becoming a consistently genuine influencer of trends; and an artist who can summon up beautiful images of women.
 
Which is precisely what Yohji did on a dank, wet and chilly Friday evening inside the City Hall of Paris, packed with 1,500 professionals and fans, hundreds happy to stand to witness a master at work.

Yohji Yamamoto played with cubism this season, adding fabric boxes, triangles, swirls and burls to some sensational coats and dresses. In a season of morning coats, Yamamoto whipped up the coolest versions, cut with quadruple tails, or fabric tentacles at the back.
 
The Japanese have always loved punk rock, and Yohji gave it a Scottish baronial spin with fab’ plaids and tartans of border princess rebels.
 
“The basis of fashion is often royalty, so why not Scottish clans,” smiled Yohji, who took the longest bow of his life to immense applause.
 
Another Yamamoto trick, hiring often unknown young models recently arrived in Paris, who feel obviously empowered and impassioned by his clothes. Aided by the most remarkable hair of the season - mad witches, impassioned Clytemnestra, devilish damsels – this was a smash hit. 
 
In short, a fashion lesson by a designer savant. […]