The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
photo, in period clothes, from workers who lived to a different rhythm and
who found in work a different dignity. So Yohji seemed to me to express
himself simultaneously in two languages, to play two different instruments
at the same time: one ephemeral, the other permanent, one fleeting, the
other enduring, one mutable, the other immutable’ (Wenders 1998:
77–8). 10
The ‘sex appeal of merchandise’ exhibited by fashion finds its carnivalesque
overturning in Yamamoto’s project: for the designer, fashion should
‘take us home’, help us rediscover a familiar friend. Fashion should substitute
unheimlich (the unfamiliar) with heimlich (the familiar), following the
perverse mechanism identified by Freud, on the basis of which the most
familiar things become strange and disturbing. Today more than ever our
‘home’ is part of this estrangement.
The designer’s work consists in representing time: ‘you design time,’ says
Yamamoto. His work, like the director’s, competes with consumption and
wear-and-tear. And so the joint project of cinema and fashion might be
conceived as one of comprehending fully the human tension towards the
past within the present.
Wenders lingers over the designer’s and his assistants’ hands as they
work on various fashion projects; hands at work replicated by the electronic
eye in their unique and infinite movements, attitudes, hesitations.
The hands are workers, generating products and artefacts; their activity is
an isotope of the ‘manipulation’ of the camera-eye. Yet again, fashion and
cinema are intrinsically linked in their triggering of synaesthesic generative
processes. The director reveals such processes when, for example, he projects
an image simultaneously onto two different screens, the traditional
cinema screen and the digital video screen in miniature, another Japanese
‘prodigy’, at once the dream of a Lilliputian shrinking of the world and the
new panopticon of that world. The filmic ‘writing’ takes on a hypertextual,
non-linear dimension: the video inside the screen opens like a window and
recalls a link in a narrative time chain.
The relation between manual skill and writing (here using the alphabet)
is explored in the filming of Yamamoto’s repeated attempts to write his
signature on the signboard of his new Tokyo emporium. This continual
rehearsal is carried out, not with a copy, but with the real thing, the
designer’s signature, the metonym hovering between the designer’s body
and his work.
The proper name, the trademark, the designer label are elements of language
that can tell stories, invent worlds and produce signs that transcend
the universe of words. All the graphological components of writing are
epitomized in the designer’s name, or rather in his signature (see Calefato
102