BEAUTY: Clothing--Yohji Yamamoto

The highly regarded and highly decorated designer Yohji Yamamoto is one of those elevated, iconic artists who are singular. While I love when a designer takes inspiration, or inspirationS from some wild, fascinating, interesting source, Yamamoto exists in a realm of his own mythology, much like Rick Owens. Yamamoto has his own vernacular and his own internal logic that, when it comes down to it, simply does not need or want inspiration or a theme. His creations--East and West elements combined into a future/retro (sometimes ecclesiastical) sensibility, layered and slouchy Bohemian chic garments, flowing asymmetrical cuts, all awash with an insouciant, rippling sense of Romanticism worthy of any French Symbolist poet--are timeless, since they are not necessarily tethered to anything outside of their orbit.

For this Spring Summer '20 collection shown at Paris Fashion Week, Yamamoto created a chapter in his ongoing sartorial story, and it is of course as viscerally artistic as always.

Fashion journalist Amy Verner spoke to Yamamoto after the show and reported, "Today, he reiterated his fear of an impending climate crisis, as well as his view that gender distinctions in menswear and womenswear have all but evaporated...Yamamoto’s approach seemed less conceptual this season, and his commentary was correspondingly direct. 'The earth is going to be crazy, really crazy,' he said. 'I’m afraid the earth is going to die.' Did he think he would see this in his lifetime? 'No, maybe our children and grandchildren.' And yet this wasn’t necessarily an exercise in fatalism. The pair of hands on the side of a garment—were they signaling some sort of diplomatic handshake or a more affectionate clasp? 'Both,' he replied."

It's a subject that is on everyone's mind. And how do we reconcile this enormous idea of cataclysm, so big that it eats away at many of us and still others cannot even completely comprehend it at all, with the daily fact of our lives and with the fact that we will still go on hoping and creating until we no longer can? As the saying goes, "Meanwhile, back at the ranch..."

Water color washes combined with sayings ("I hold you, you hold me" and "Mother F******" on tees), and an interesting investigation of the shapes of European heraldic designs on sleeves. All of this beauty is grounded by his signature wide-cut, cropped, flowing trousers. I would gladly have one of everything shown here. And wear it all until I no longer can.

https://www.yohjiyamamoto.co.jp/