BEAUTY: Clothing--Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto is a designer who operates within his own vernacular, his own mythology, much like Rick Owens, Vivienne Westwood, and McQueen. For his Fall-Winter 2020-2021 show at Paris Fashion Week, he showed his staples: silhouettes that have a sense of the Depression Era about them, mixed with the kind of roomy cuts one finds in traditional Japanese clothing, and a hint of Edwardian streetwear to temper the looks. It's Romantic, sometimes swashbuckling. But this collection had a bit of an edge: models were dirtied up to look hardscrabbled, and clothing was frayed, much like tempers around the world right now. Yamamoto called this collection "Partisan" and the invitation to the show featured a vintage image of a French woman raising her fist in defiance of Nazis during WWII. Backstage, Yamamoto said, "I am tired. I’m becoming a little bit dangerous, I’m becoming naughty--about myself and to my home country, to the world, to the fashion world...I used to explain my spirit as anti-trend, anti-fashion. I kept saying I’m an outsider. Now the vocabulary is not enough. And I’m angry about what’s going on in fashion, so I have become partisan." The events of our time are forcing us to become partisan. Sitting it out is no longer a choice.

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