Yohji Yamamoto
Groundbreaking Japanese Fashion Designer By Ranjani GopalarathinamYamamoto's designs allow fashionable women to be playfully intellectual and think differently about what a provocative garment looks like.
Though not the first Japanese designer to show on the Paris runways, Yohji Yamamoto made quite an impression at his Paris debut in 1981: buyers rushed to his showroom the following season to ooh and aah over (and buy) his experimental garments. No small feat for a virtually unknown designer with a nontraditional background to boot. But, like any pioneering artist, Yamamoto leveraged his differences and re-visualized conventional notions of dressing for women. Yamamoto's models are often draped in minimal, unstructured garments that blend the straight lines of Western dressing with the versatility of traditional Japanese clothing, like the kimono. Today, an amorphous silhouette may be super in-style on big city streets, but at the time most women's clothes by Western designers headed towards the snugger fit and formality trendy in the 1980's. To this day, Yamamoto's voluminous silhouettes consist almost always of entirely new shapes. To achieve this, he often works with futuristic original textiles. His designs allow fashionable women to be playfully intellectual, and influence the culture at large to think differently about what a provocative garment looks like.
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