Word: yohji
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...didn't get to town a few weeks earlier. From April 9 through 17, Tokyo played host to its second official season of fashion shows, 33 in all, featuring standout work not only by Miyake and the other two members of the Tokyo triumvirate (Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garons) but by a brace of younger, less familiar talent. Although the so-called Japanese look has got roughed up--even as it has been ripped off--by the fashion establishment, and much of the fashion press tries to write it off and wipe it out, the Tokyo...
...Tokyo shows were organized by a council of premier designers created by Yohji Yamamoto, Kawakubo, Miyake, Mitsuhiro Matsuda, Kansai Yamamoto and Hanae Mori to wedge the country's talent into the traditional fashion route: Milan, Paris, New York. Paris is still the major market, however, even for Tokyo's finest. "Showing there, from the design point of view, is more intense," Kawakubo says. "It's the first presentation of my new work in front of journalists from all over the world." These, however, are not the best of times for any design that makes demands on the initiative and imagination...
Short photo essays concentrate on seven designers, among them Miyake, the ebulliently inventive Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo, whose designs demonstrate what Koren calls "irony, image juxtaposition and whimsy . . . the purest, most uncompromising and strongest avant-garde vision." The book also includes chapters of careful observation on history and tradition, fabric design, graphic display and body structure (illustrated with vintage photos of women who dive for fish outside a village east of Tokyo). "I make style out of life," Miyake says, "not style out of style." The roots of that life are beautifully revealed in a series of candid photos...
...pull clothes off racks, hold them up, try them on. Armani's definitive long coats and shorter sexy skirts; his loose, liquid, wool jumpsuits; his jackets with turned-down lapels; his heart-stopping evening wear... heaven on a hanger! Claude Montana's huge coats in electroshock colors; Yohji Yamamoto's sweaters in colors like a deep-sea bottom! Saint Laurent's peerless pants! It is easy enough, in the midst of all this, for any buyer to go nicely nuts. "This is it! This is the end!" said Krull, leaping to her feet at the sight...
...Yohji Yamamoto, whose wondrously simple cascades of fabric combine Kawakubo's seriousness and Miyake's ebullience, may say that "fashion is fashion. In the end I think that fashion should not be an art." But he also expects his clothes to have the social impact of some major masterwork. "If you want to wear these," he says, "then you must change your situation...