BEAUTY: Clothing--Yohji Yamamoto

I always love seeing a Yohji Yamamoto collection...the highly regarded and highly decorated designer 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 sartorial vernacular and his own internal logic. His creations--Asian and Western 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.

So for this 2024 Spring Summer collection shown at Paris Fashion Week, Yamamoto showed his usual oeuvre with some variations on a theme. The self-proclaimed King of Black has been using more color in his collections the past few seasons and we see a bit of white and red here although his justification for the blood red is a little grim: "There is so much going wrong in the world; when I think of all these bad things I just think of blood." We also see prints in this collection which is not unusual but this time he blew up illustrations for art books spanning the Middle Ages to our current age. The prints become a beacon on the long, draping shorts and the flowing kimono-like coats. And to top it off, he introduced raw, unfinished edges and safety pins holding sections together on many garments. As fashion journalist Odunayo Ojo remarked in his Vogue review of the collection, "It’s very difficult to create unfinished garments that look well made. It’s a testament to Yamamoto’s design acumen that you can see the skill that goes into creating that balance between rawness and perfection." Well said.

Please do take a look at the video to see how the pieces move on the body when in motion.

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