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Dark Poetry in Slow Motion: Yohji Yamamoto’s Melancholic Heroines Unravel to Reveal the Beauty of Imperfection.

Video and Image Credit: Yohji Yamamoto

Painting with monochromes

Choosing an outfit is choosing a life, according to Yohji Yamamoto. This man has the uncanny ability – more so than just about any other designer I can think of – to evoke intense emotion through his work. It still is one of those flashbulb memory moments, the first time I touched the cloth (a beautiful black Japanese cotton) of a Yohji skirt in London in the early Nineties. A-line, simple and in my opinion, pure perfection it was. That piece of clothing single-handedly changed my outlook on the traditional aesthetics of form, line, texture and construction – on life, in fact! Here was a silhouette that didn’t feel the need to squeeze the body into a traditional shape, but rather to envelop (not expose!), to wrap and protect it with intelligent lines and empathic contours … what a seismic shift that was in my perception of fashion. I’ve never looked back.

Chain detail is a feature in this classic shape

Engineering in this shapely ensemble

Season after season Yohji Yamamoto has brought us offerings from his black palette and we’ve come to expect the sheer exquisiteness of his creations as a given. We’ve also come to anticipate and marvel at the raw edges, the masterful tailoring, the minimalism, the deconstructivist quirks, the asymmetry, the masculine details, the random touches and the oversized volumes. This Fall/Winter 2021/22 collection was no exception.

Origami shapes embellish this dress

A statuesque, floor-sweeping corseted dress

A frilly dress with white piping

On Yohji’s stage the world slowed down its pace tenfold as models, stoic and serene, took their time to introduce us to each magical piece – no rush whatsoever. Black coats with unexpected fringe details on the back and floor sweeping sculptural dresses with architectural features (and serious textile ‘civil engineering’) took to the midnight black stage. Next up were asymmetrical strappy gowns, the structured white piping on the black dresses becoming loose threads towards the hems of the dresses, fraying and swinging. Cut out segments from the tops of sleeves echoed the cutout features in the leggings that accompanied many of the pieces. White piping details criss crossed on the back of coats to drape to the floor in the most endearing way. The piping gave way to chains swinging and swishing from dresses and coats. A most striking piece of chainmail jewellery adorned a mode’s face, as if part of a sacred ritual. A corseted dress – dignified and statuesque – was reminiscent of folk tales of yore, as a dress with asymmetrically applied black origami flowers.

Architectural construction in these faded red-ribbon applications!

The music changed midway through the show, from a hauntingly nostalgic tune to much grittier rock cords, and the clothes responded accordingly. Leather and strong tailoring, the piping having morphed into heavy leather thongs on garments, solid flat boots anchoring the looks. An oversized safety pin on an even more oversized jacket, a black and white printed jacket with fraying as a feature, the recurring chain details as well as the ‘Fukk Ya’ print on one of the dresses may have been a sign of Yohji, forever the punk, showing a finger!

A punkish, oversized jacket with enormous safety pin

One of the most striking silhouettes in the collection: a cropped leather jacket with chain belt

A series of shapes reminiscent of ancient Greek goddesses in their classical, statuesque shapes, followed – drapes, folds, pin tucks and fringes. An exceptional piece was the egg shaped oversized black and white coat, which enveloped the model like a cocoon. In the last third of the show we were treated to the man himself imparting life’s wisdom in his music track, while some colour (red) was introduced in the form of angular, almost architectural shapes applied to dresses. Amongst the many standout pieces in the collection were a cropped leather biker’s jacket and a deconstructed leather jacket with thongs wrapped around the sleeves that, no doubt will fly off the shelves come autumn.

An homage to punk perchance?

The Yojhi touch was ever present: in the voluminous shapes – often oversized, in the sculptural and skewed aesthetic in every silhouette – from the Japanese folding techniques to the designer fraying and in the characteristic randomness of so many of the details. The sheer graphic-ness of this, like most Yohji collections, always takes my breath away. To elicit so much emotion without the use of colour requires the touch of a magician.

A standout piece in the collection – a deconstructed leather jacket with wrapped wrists

An enveloping egg-shaped coat with painterly details echoing the fringing in the collection

A perfect (perhaps the biased opinion of a forever Yohji fan!) collection built on deliberate imperfections came full circle: what started with tiny fringe details became white piping, which morphed into chains and heavy leather thongs, which subsequently turned into heavy pieces of torn fabric. These became very controlled ribbons dangling from the folded ‘architectural’ shapes on dresses and finally motifs magicked their way onto printed fabric.

I can’t help but wonder if Yohji the soothsayer and sage was trying to tell us something about what’s been happening around us? Are we, as a society, fraying at the edges, too?

Pat Mc Grath, famous make-up artist, said in an interview, ‘You don’t wear Yohji, you come to life in it.’ It echoes my sentiments exactly: it is that indescribable ability that this designer has to give us infinitely much more than just frocks. It is poetry in motion, food for the soul. And food for thought.