“These three avant-garde designers have become an international ...

Title: What’s in a narrative? Interpreting Yohji Yamamoto in the Museum
I. Yohji Yamamoto: widely exhibited
In the early 1980s, the Japanese “invaded” the fashion world. The term “Japanese
invasion,” a harsh reference to several waves of designers from Japan who appeared on
the international fashion scene has not only puzzled and fascinated many in the fashion
industry it has also attracted the attention of the wider art and museum community. 1 I
argue that an 1983 exhibition of Yohji Yamamoto, along with Issey Miyake and Rei
Kawakubo under the label Comme des Garçons, curated by Jean C. Hildreth at the
Phoenix Art Museum set the tone for understanding these designers in a display context. 2
Since this show, entitled, A New Wave in Fashion: Three Japanese Designers, other
museum-based exhibitions held in the past decade in Western Europe, North America,
and Australia showing Yamamoto’s work have maintained the now established tropes of
the Japanese avant-garde fashion exhibition phenomenon, notably the designers’
classification as a group, as “avant-garde,” and as separate from “Western fashion.”
Yamamoto’s place in this historical narrative, however, is far from standardized.
Exhibitions’ interpretations—while maintaining the above principles—display his work
from multiple approaches, ranging from “high art,” to bizarre, such as Where Would You
Wear That: The Mary Baskett Collection, displayed in the summer of 2007 at the
Cincinnati Art Museum. Still others contextualize his work as exotically Japanese, or as
haute couture objects, conferring the role of master tailor and cutter to Yamamoto. Most
of the exhibitions, however, categorize Yamamoto under more than one label, presenting
the viewer with different layers of contradictory meaning. The diversity of creators and
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spaces implicated in this Yamamoto exhibition phenomenon follows the various training
of the organizers. Asian art curators, Architecture and Design curators, and fashion
specialists—Costume curators or the designers themselves—all participated in the
dialogue. Here, I will explore these themes highlighting key examples from this
exhibition history—numbering over twenty.
Yohji Yamamoto was born in Tokyo in 1943. Although his initial formation steered
him away from the clothing industry (he attained a law degree from Keio University in
1966), in 1969 he graduated from Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College (Bunka Fukuso
Gakuin). Yamamoto worked in his mother’s dressmaking shop before opening Y’s Inc. in
1972 and presenting his first Tokyo collection five years later. He went to Paris in April
1981 (at the same time as Rei Kawakubo) and by that autumn was granted membership to
the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs
de Mode. Yamamoto’s first museum exhibition in 1983 came just two years after he
debuted his prêt-à-porter collection in Paris, which incited visceral reactions of both
wonder and contempt. An article in the October 21, 1982 issue of Le Figaro warned
against the “yellow danger,” and described the “World War III survivors’ look.” 3 Others,
however, appreciated his work as a visionary and important contribution to fashion. This
perception of his clothes as different from the fashion norm, as taking part in a larger
artistic phenomenon almost overcoming fashion, caused museums to take notice. 4
Yohji Yamamoto has been called a philosopher, a genius, a poet, and an artist.” 5 He
aligns himself with the figure of the heroic artist, noting, “Creating art should be done in
a process of struggle and suffering […].” 6 In Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the
Fashion System, Barbara Vinken elucidates other’s similar opinions, notably when
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critiquing Notebooks on Cities and Clothes, Wim Wenders’ 1989 documentary of
Yamamoto, who “is represented as an irreplaceable créateur who can teach fashion how
once again to become authentic…One sees here the return of the aesthetics of genius
which has passed into haute couture […] [Wenders] transforms the Japanese formulation
of the relation to alterity into an apotheosis of old European authority, a nostalgic
masculine authorship […] in the ongoing history of Romanticism.” 7 It is not surprising
then that curators often present Yamamoto’s clothes as “high art,” sometimes losing the
“garment” function altogether.
According to Yamamoto, “I start with the fabric, the actual material, the “feel” of it. I
then move onto the form. Possibly what counts most for me is the feel. And then, when I
start working on the material, I think my way into the form it ought to assume.” 8 Curators
often highlight the formal qualities of Yamamoto’s garments, as seen in the 2004 show
Form Follows Function at the Museum at FIT. Here, curator Valerie Steele analyzed the
work of designers including Miyake, Yamamoto, Kawakubo, and Watanabe as though
they were abstract sculpted works of architecture taking part of a fashion tradition after
designers such as Cristóbal Balenciaga, Charles James, and Mme. Grès, early pioneers of
an “architectural” and “functional” approach to design. Three years later, the Asian Art
Museum in San Francisco exhibited Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion
from the Kyoto Costume Institute, which studied the garments of Miyake, Kawakubo,
Yamamoto, Watanabe, and Tao Kurihara as a kind of sculpture. Here they were also
displayed through the photographic lens in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black and white
photographs, which captured the garments’ shadows, lines, and form, further stressing
their material and sculptural qualities. These two exhibitions, held in two fundamentally
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different institutions, both treated Yamamoto as working in a non-fashion design mode. 9
François Baudot likens Yamamoto’s work to the 1960s conceptual art movement,
whose practitioners, he argues, “sought to replace the work of art itself with the idea of
underlying it, the project of its gestation, the analysis of its concept and its effects.” 10
Curators have emphasized the conceptual, as opposed to the formal, qualities of his work.
In 2006, Yamamoto’s work was again placed on a parallel with architecture at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in
Fashion and Architecture, which explored the work of both architects, such as Zaha
Hadid and Frank Gehry, and fashion designers. In this case, however, curator Brooke
Hodge explored “the common visual and intellectual principles [of the two disciplines],”
from their direct relationship with space and the human body to ideas of shelter, identity,
creative process and stylistic tendencies such as Yamamoto’s interest in the
deconstruction of form to rethink traditional tailored garments.
Designers in 1980s fashion, like their conceptualist counterparts, sought engagement
with everyday life, and found their inspiration in the real world and its inhabitants.
Likewise, Yohji Yamamoto sought a distinct and intimate relationship with his wearer.
He attempts to create clothing that corresponds exactly to the individual and at the same
time conforms to a system of typologies that look to the past, at odds with fashion’s
fleeting game and obsession with newness. According to one wearer, “I had always
wanted to understand how the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, a man of a
different generation and a very different culture from my own, could know so exactly
what I wanted to wear and how to express my identity through a piece of clothing.” 11 In
looking to the pre-modern consumer culture past he envisions a time when people
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dressed for their role in society. We might find parallels in his desire to make “costumes”
for working women, or in the “utilitarian” and “secondhand” in his clothing, which, as
explained by François Baudot, “looked lived-in, as though it had acquired a patina with
the passage of time […] it reflected the hatred of what is new.” 12
Yamamoto uprooted and broke clothing conventions and codes, against the norm of
1980s haute couture opulence, rethinking traditional ideas of beauty and gender. From the
mid-nineties, Yamamoto often deconstructs traditional Western silhouettes, prompting
Patricia Mears to characterize his work as “romantic avant-gardism.” 13 According to
Yamamoto, “I want to achieve anti-fashion through fashion. That’s why I’m always
heading in my own direction, in parallel to fashion. Because if you’re not waking what is
asleep, you might as well stay on the beaten path.” 14 He seeks to redefine a universal
concept of beauty that has manifested itself in distinct forms throughout his career:
rethinking of historical Western dress, a preference for asymmetrical shapes, oversized
clothes, and models of all ages and looks challenging established norms of perfection,
age, and the body. Most notable was Yamamoto’s initial refusal to succumb to traditional
forms of feminine glamour and sex appeal through the use of makeup, heels, and form-
fitting clothes. Many scholars are fascinated by the ambiguity of gender in his work,
whether his use of women models in menswear shows or the creation of forms that refuse
to conform to traditional Western definitions of womenswear or menswear.
A 2001 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Radical Fashion: Trends of
the Future, focused on the “revolutionary” in his work but situated his clothes in an
international context that also included the work of Alexander McQueen, Hussein
Chalayan, Issey Miyake, Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe,
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Azzendine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, and Helmut Lang. Notably on
display was Yamamoto’s unconventional wedding dress in mother of pearl silk with a
hoop skirt and hidden pockets (Spring/Summer 1999). Five years later in 2006, Breaking
the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection at the Los Angeles
County Museum again displayed Yamamoto’s work with most of the same names. The
garments curators Sharon S. Takeda and Kaye D. Spilker chose to display showed
Yamamoto’s revisions of traditional Western fashion elements including a tailored
women’s two-piece suit in wool gabardine (Autumn/Winter 1993-1994) whose “in-
progress” state—complete with “temporary” stitches—was thought to be radical. Also on
display was a three-piece ensemble composed of trousers, a silk satin coat with a
voluminous lace train, and wide-brimmed straw hat (Spring/Summer 1999). The curators’
choice of garments from Yamamoto’s Spring/Summer 1999 Collection, as done at the
V&A, is significant as scholars have noted its break from his earlier designs to those
referencing haute couture, defining radical in terms of traditional Western dress. 15
A reviewer from Jardin des Modes, describing the 1982 collections of Yamamoto and
Kawakubo, stated, “These two collections are in absolute rupture with our Western
vision.” 16 This statement—in view of the anti-Japanese sentiment of the 1980s—conjures
a new meaning. Museums remained quiet during this decade during which Japanese
control of U.S. industrial sectors was at its height. It is only in the late nineties that
Yamamoto became a suitable exhibition subject. At this time, many shows built on the
foundation made by Jean C. Hildreth in 1983, situating Yamamoto as a Japanese designer
in a narrative of revolutionary, atypical dress in the broader history of fashion. 17
Two displays coincided with A New Wave in Fashion: Three Japanese Designers: a
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display of contemporary Japanese ceramics in the Decorative Arts Gallery and another
exhibiting contemporary Japanese textiles including robes with designs by Keisuke
Serizawa, one of Japan’s “Living National Treasures,” effectively placing these foreign
makers in this privileged narrative. This narrative began with Hanae Mori who went to
Paris in 1961 and was admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 1977,
followed by Kenzo Takeda’s ready-to-wear successes in the 1970s, and ending with the
“inheritors” of Yamamoto’s generation. These exhibitions contend that the Japanese
designers partake in what the Powerhouse Museum labeled “Neo-Japonism.” 18 That is,
they draw inspiration from traditional Japanese clothing and dressmaking methods,
whereby “oversized” and layered conquers form-fitting and tailored cuts. 19 Textile
innovation and “fine craftsmanship” are other commonly attributed features. 20
Contemporary Japanese Fashion: the Mary Baskett Collection, an expanded version of
the Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2007 Where Would You Wear That opens next month at the
Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. This exhibition, fifteen years after A New Wave in
Fashion, does not stray from the accepted guidelines in its exploration of the work of
Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto, treating them as Eastern avant-garde designers,
whose clothes, the museum claims, are “characterized by asymmetry, raw edges,
unconventional construction, oversized proportions and monochromatic palettes.” 21
Labeling Yamamoto’s work as Japanese in exhibitions, however, defines against an
oversimplification of Japanese dress whether contemporary Japanese clothing, or
traditional kimono. 22 Patricia Mears contends that the press almost always labels these
“avant-gardists” as inseparable from their Asian heritage and questions what classifies
their clothes as “Japanese” if their separate bodies of work or creative processes neither
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esemble each other nor the standard in Japan. 23
“Despite the fact that all of them share a common heritage and are of the
same generation, these individuals differ startlingly in their creative
output. Issey Miyake is often described as the most optimistic and
forward-looking of them…By contrast Yohji Yamamoto’s revisions of
historical Western dress place him in the “romantic” faction of today’s
avant-garde. He often combines recognizable Western silhouettes, such as
the bustle, with unorthodox materials to create the most beautiful of avantgarde
fashions. Intellectualism is the defining element of Rei Kawakubo’s
work […] In her overriding desire to create fashions that defy
conventional beauty while at the same time redefining what we see as
fashionable, Kawakubo is the quintessential postmodern designer.” 24
In 2003, the Musée des Arts Asiatiques, a small museum in Nice devoted to the art of
China, Japan, India, and Indochina, presented XXIème Ciel: Mode in Japan, displaying
the garments of Yamamoto, Miyake, Kawakubo, and Wantanabe. The director, Marie-
Pierre Foissy Aufrère, saw in the garments of these makers an intrinsic link to ancient
Asian cultures, that mysterious quality or “côté magique” found in Japanese art. 25 She
was met with initial refusal, however, when proposing the idea to the designers who
refused to be exhibited on the basis of an outdated Orientalism. 26
This exhibition did not provide a historical overview of contemporary Japanese
fashion or the usual discourse on radical design. Rather, as Patricia Mears, a collaborator
on this project, notes, curators created “a visual story that evoked the beautiful qualities
of Japanese design from a decidedly Western point of view.” 27 French conceptual artist
Gotscho (whose work often focuses on fashion) designed the exhibition space, placing
the garments in a theatrical display of fashion clichés including the coat rack and top
model. These strange juxtapositions and lack of contextualizing information perhaps
allowed the garments to speak for themselves as such, highlighting the differences
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etween the designers, entreating the viewer to question and find their own definitions.
Gotscho’s Robe X Lustre, Yamamoto’s dress from Spring/Summer 1999 interwoven with
a chandelier, lying decadently on the ground over a red carpet, contrast familiar yet
disparate objects. On a second level, the garments interacted with the permanent
collection of the museum. While at times strikingly and beautiful, the displays did not
always provide clear answers for the viewer, presenting him or her with a vague mix of
contemporary fashions, Asian fine arts and contemporary French art. Mears contends that
in the case of Yamamoto, whose romantic clothing draws “inspiration from the past while
it simultaneously was veiled in the degradation so prevalent in our contemporary world,”
the organizers’ messages were easier to grasp. 28
“I happen to have been born in Japan. But I’ve never labelled myself in that way.” 29
Despite his repeated protests, refusing to identify himself in terms of his origins and
preferring to remain a “citizen of the world,” the identity question remains unresolved.
While Yamamoto has often denied being interested in exploiting his Japanese roots, he
has also embraced them at times. “For a long time I didn't want to touch it—I am
Japanese and I didn't want to do souvenirs […] Then one day, I thought it is time to touch
it and to break all my taboos—kimonos, body fit, high heels.” 30 He has also expressed his
criticism of labeling Japanese fashion as being “one thing only,” preferring to create
something universal. 31 Finding the “Japanese” in his clothes is impossible because there
does not exist a shared definition of Japanese. Today, Western style clothes seem to
match the definition more than the traditional kosode of yore.
Carla Jones and Ann Marie Leshkowich examine the globalization of Asian dress,
notably the changing ways in which people inside and outside of Asia see clothing and
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dress. They begin by describing the major confrontation that took place in the 1990s: on
one side, what they term “Asian chic” (including yoga, acupuncture, organic vegetables,
sarong skirts, and kimono jackets) becomes part of the Western fashion vocabulary, while
retaining exotic flair. On the other side, “Asian men and women confronted the mundane,
but increasingly complicated, dilemma of what clothes to make, sell, buy, and wear.” 32
Historians Richard Martin and Harold Koda similarly describe Orientalism as a
fabrication of the West with no true source where “ethnicity is also suppressed in the
amalgams of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Southeast Asian dress that come to the
Western imagination. Unable to see specific ethnic origins, the West permits the aura and
does not require a specific anthropological place.” 33
Japonism is an established—and long challenged—construction in the Western
tradition. At the end of Japan’s isolation period in the 1860s, artists like Pierre Bonnard
and James McNeill Whistler used Japanese imagery, as seen from newly discovered
ukiyo-e prints, as signifiers of the erotic, natural, and primitive in their paintings. In their
parallel design reform cause, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser looked to Japanese
ceramics and other objects to create new forms. Jun I. Kunai contends that japonism in
fashion, as in these other mediums, evolved from “the imitation of individual motifs to
stylistic assimilation, and from there to creative transformations.” 34 Most narratives of
Japonism in Western dress begin in the late nineteenth century evidenced by the
application of new motifs to garments and the emergence of the tea gown, which
resembled the aesthetics of Japanese robes. Some note the similarities between Japanese
and modern art, which lent themselves to fashions of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the
borrowing of minimal forms into the 1940s and 1950s. 35 These mid-century
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developments, however, remain in the shadow of the arrival of the postmodern Japanese
avant-garde designers. According to Richard Martin, in his writings on Bernard
Rudofsky’s 1965 text Our Kimono Mind, these designers not only rethought fashionable
form, they made wearers rethink modes of dressing and consumption, proposing non-
elitist and adaptable clothing, thus changing the dynamics of the fashion industry. 36
Finally, these designers seek to create an “ism-free” universal dress form. 37
Japonism in Fashion: Japan Dresses the West marked a critical step in treating this
subject in the museum. Akiko Fukai, director and curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute,
first presented this show at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in 1989. In 1996,
it traveled to TFT Hall in Tokyo, Musée Galliera in Paris, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, ending at the Museum of New Zealand, each
institution’s curator—in collaboration with Fukai—treating the theme slightly
differently. 38 The exhibition presented 120 years worth of “influence,” beginning with
Charles Frederick Worth and culminating with Yamamoto’s wire-mesh “Draped Female
Sculpture.”
While this blockbuster show made important advances in dress history studies, future
exhibitions should focus on narrower timeframes, to better inform the viewer of the
necessary socio-economic context and foster more effectual debate. Yoshiaki Shimizu, a
scholar of Japanese art, argues that Japan is misrepresented in Western exhibitions,
noting “Japanese art has been more or less accommodated to the Euro-American art-
historical enterprise, as seen in such exhibitions as The Great Wave at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in 1974 and in the various explanations of japonisme.” 39 Exhibitions
highlight the cultural disparity as the two cultures do not share the same distinction
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etween the high and low arts, where Western historians often place clothing. Do these
avant-garde designers, taking part in something that cannot be confined to a Japanese
rubric, belong in these japonism narratives? As long as commentators in the art and
fashion world continue to prioritize their origins, Yohji Yamamoto’s garments and
sculptures have a place in this contemporary neo-japonism.
II. Rewriting Narratives: Yohji Yamamoto 2005 Exhibition Triptych
Yamamoto’s concept that fashion should be “alive” and for the “moment” contradicts
the clothing exhibitions he has taken part in, as well as his donation of garments to the
permanent collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. “I’m not interested in old clothing.
[…] I don’t keep any of my fashion at all, so I told them I wasn’t interested in making an
exposition. I’m not interested in my own past. Fashion is not that. Fashion is for people
of today, this moment.” 40 With this thinking in mind, Yamamoto had consistently denied
proposals for museum retrospectives of his work, notably an unsuccessful attempt by the
Centre Georges Pompidou in the late 1980s. Likewise, in 2001 a proposed collaboration
between Yamamoto and the Brooklyn Museum never materialized; Yamamoto would
have had a large role in the conception of this exhibition, for which he studied the
museum’s Charles James archive. 41 Finally, in 2005, a Yamamoto retrospective traveled
to Florence, Paris, and Antwerp where the designer and his work were examined from
multiple perspectives, revealing the difference of each space and museum philosophy.
In this case our object of study is the museum retrospective, challenging curators to
decide in which context to place Yamamoto. Exhibiting the work of a living fashion
designer raises uncomfortable conflicts of interest. Teresa Mendez of the Christian
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Monitor observed: “To some purists, who see fashion as ephemeral and therefore the
antithesis of enduring art, these exhibits are purely commercial—and questionable.” 42
Guy Trebay likens retrospectives of living designers to “authorized biographies” and
“historical fictions.” 43 The curators of the project were Olivier Saillard, programming
director at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, and Masao Nihei, Yohji
Yamamoto’s habitual fashion show assistant. Their individual roles were unclear,
although it is probable that each had conflicting motivations, one concerned with creating
a successful blockbuster show and the other with representing the artist and his company.
The first venue was Correspondences at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of the Palazzo
Pitti, the only exhibition of the three that was not held in a costume museum, despite the
existence of the Costume Gallery at the Palazzo, entreating the viewer to treat these
works not as garments but as works of art. Here, approximately 100 Yamamoto pieces
were interspersed in the Gallery’s thirty rooms displaying nineteenth and twentieth-
century sculpture and painting, taking part in “correspondences.” That is, these different
art forms engaged in a dialogue with each other, the interiors, and the viewer. This was
implied by the suggestive placement of the non-contextualized garments, unprotected by
glass cases, in relation to the other art. Although inherently different, the objects were
linked by their classification as works of art, and, according to the organizers, as sharing
a common ideal of beauty. Yamamoto, dissatisfied with the result, was known to have
disapprovingly remarked the heaviness of the clothes next to the art.” 44
In Paris, the Musée de la Mode et du Textile consecrated its two floors to the
exhibition that became Juste des vêtements. Here, the organizers were more concerned
with Yamamoto’s creation process—the first floor simulated his Tokyo studio including
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a montage of his sketches and fabrics strewn across the floor, garments in progress, and
even the office of the première d’atelier. Elsewhere, antiques, books, and historic
clothing from the museum's archives illustrated Yamamoto’s inspiration. The second
floor display showed Yamamoto’s garments in a French history of costume narrative, the
only of the three installations to do so. Here, the curators displayed a selection of designs
they considered best represented the designer’s development from the early 1980s to the
present, eighty-five percent of which where the same garments from Correspondences,
terminating in a final confrontation that paid tribute to Dior, Vionnet, Mme. Grès, and
Chanel. Here, too, certain garments were not hidden behind display cases allowing for
visitors to touch them, a first for the museum.
The final stop of the triptych was Dream Shop at the ModeMuseum. In Dream shop,
the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to one designer, visitors could revel in the
materiality of Yamamoto’s clothes: out of eighty silhouettes from the late 1980s to today,
visitors could try on about twenty in a white, dream-like space with neon-lit changing
cubicles. This interactive experience goes against the mindset of conservation and basic
museum etiquette. Nathalie Ours, a Yamamoto spokesperson, explained that this was the
first exhibition that corresponded to the designer’s concept of the viewer’s direct and
“living” relationship to the garment. 45 In most cases, the transformation of “living”
garments into “dead” objects on display distances them from their original context and
from the audience. Here, however, viewers perceived the clothes as consumable items.
This interactive experience became a commercial one, simulating the store environment,
as the spectators quickly attuned themselves to the rhythm of handling and trying on the
clothes, thus acting as a stimulus to purchase. Here, exhibition, publicity, and commercial
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motives were more clearly highlighted than at the two previous venues.
With the exhibition triptych, curators strengthened the established canon of
Yamamoto’s most noted works, such as his androgynous suits and selections from his
Spring/Summer 1999 collection. Curators introduced other garments into the museum
narrative, such as his Wedding dress with crinoline in bamboo (Autumn/Winter 1998-
1999) and his “kimono-inspired” dresses and coats (Spring/Summer 1995). The striking
differences in conception and display either presented the garments on a par with fine arts
or costume history, allowed the viewer a glimpse of the production context and
Yamamoto’s creative process, or to indulge in a wonderful tactile experience as the
wearer. Curators withheld essential social framework, however: none of them examined
what was so powerful about this radical body of work, what made it stand apart from
Western clothes in the early 1980s, how that has changed over the course of Yamamoto’s
long career, and what it meant at the time of display. The exhibition triptych, seen in the
larger context of the Yamamoto exhibition phenomenon, permitted a more in-depth
analysis of the designer, basically unfettered by narratives of japonism, avant-garde dress,
and high art. His work, however, lends itself to more than one narrative and has served as
material evidence of a number of themes. Isn't the desire to have things neatly explained
precisely the problem? This question shall unfold as Yamamoto’s repertoire—and his
place in historical narratives—continues to expand and modify.
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1 For a summary of the press reviews documenting Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s Paris
debut, see Pamela Golbin, “Constat d’état ou flashback sur le paysage de la mode parisienne,” in
XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 29-35.
2 Certain scholars place Issey Miyake with Kenzo Takada in the first so-called wave in the late
1960s and early 1970s (Patricia Mears, “Être japonais: une question d’identité,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode
in Japan, 40) or as the “founding father” of the second wave (Yuniya Kawamura, “La révolution
japonaise dans la mode parisienne,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 47). Designers of the newer
generation have included Jun Takahashi, Hiroaki Ohya, Kosuke Tsumara, Masahiro Nakagawa, Naoki
Takizawa, Kansai Yamamoto, Junko Koshino, Takao Ikeda, and Mitsuhiro Matsuda.
3 Janie Samet, Le Figaro, October 21, 1982, my translation, cited in Akiko Fukai, “Le Japon et la
mode,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 22.
4 Patricia Mears notes: “They are widely regarded as creative artists by art critics and museum
curators, and their work has been enthusiastically collected and incorporated work into innovative art
and design exhibitions.” (“Exhibiting Asia: The Global Impact of Japanese Fashion in Museums and
Galleries,” Fashion Theory 12, 96).
5 Huckbody, “Interviews: conversations with some of the most brilliant minds in fashion. Yohji
Yamamoto,” Harper’s Bazaar.
6 Yohji Yamamoto cited in “Clothes in rebellion,” The Japanese Times Weekly.
7 Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, 72.
8 Yohji Yamamoto, in Baudot, Yohji Yamamoto, 11.
9 Sarah Braddock Clarke similarly notes: “Form is a major consideration and recurring dilemma –
what shape should emerge from a particular cloth? Working in a way not unlike a sculptor he builds
and takes away to refine the shape, draping and cutting the fabric, observing the way it falls and catches
the light.” (“River deep, mountain high: Yohji Yamamoto continues his fashion journey,” Selvedge,
41.)
10 Baudot, Yohji Yamamoto, 6.
11 Milenovich, Kimonos, 7. Sarah Braddock Clarke adds: “It is an indefinable character, a certain
feeling, that sets Yohji Yamamoto apart from other designers – he appears to understand how we relate
to our clothing and what we wish to communicate in their wearing.” (“River deep, mountain high:
Yohji Yamamoto continues his fashion journey,” Selvedge, 40.)
12 Baudot, Yohji Yamamoto, 12.
13 Mears, “Révolutionnaires: Rei Kawakubo et Yohji Yamamoto,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan,
68.
14 Yohji Yamamoto, “May I help you,” in Talking to Myself vol. 1 (n.p).
15 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, 143.
16 Ginette Sainderichin, “Éditorial: Le bonze et la kamikaze,” Jardin des modes, December 1982, 5,
cited in Pamela Golbin, “Constat d’état ou flashback sur le paysage de la mode parisienne,” my
translation, in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 29.
17 Hildreth, A New Wave in Fashion: Three Japanese Designers, 40. The author contextualizes
them in the history of fashion “revolutions” along with Poiret’s hobble skirt and Dior’s “New Look.”
18 This term is used by the Powerhouse Museum in “Teachers’ Exhibition Notes, The Cutting Edge:
Fashion from Japan,” 2.
19 For different approaches to Japanese and Western design, see Richard Martin, “Our Kimono
Mind: Reflections on Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950” Journal of Design History, 219.
20 Jean Hildreth notes: “Known for his innovative fabrics, Yohji has them treated and prepared
using traditional methods such as “stone washing,” and also rinsing bolts of cotton in the Nagoro River
near his factory in Gifu.” (A New Wave in Fashion, 44.)
21 “Upcoming Exhibitions. ‘Contemporary Japanese Fashion: the Mary Baskett Collection,’” The
Textile Museum,

www.textilemuseum.org/exhibitions/upcoming/Contemporary_Japanese_Fashion.htm.
22 For a summary of Japanese dress from the mid-nineteenth century, see Akiko Fukai, “Le Japon et
la mode,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 21.
23 Patricia Mears, “Être japonais: une question d’identité,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 37. “La
quasi totalité des articles les concernant et des critiques de leurs collections bisannuelles ont commencé
par décrire Miyake, Kawakubo et Yamamoto comme des créateurs inséparables de leur héritage
asiatique, et tout entier contenus dans celui-ci.”
24 Mears in Fukai, Japonism in Fashion: Japan Dresses the West.
25 Marie-Pierre Foissy, “Histoires du XXIèmeCiel,” in XXIèmeCiel: Mode in Japan, 11. “Je sentis
immédiatement, de façon intuitive mais claire, la nécessité de traiter ce sujet aussi fascinant et
mystérieux que l’était, à mes yeux, l’art japonais.”
26 Ibid, 11. “je cherchais à établir un pont avec la création contemporaine en prenant contact, à
Paris, avec les représentants des principales maisons aux produits si fascinants: Kenzo, Issey Miyake,
Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garcons, Jun Ashida […] Cependant ces tentatives furent vaines. Il me
fut répondu, de façon générale, que les créateurs japonais ne souhaitaient pas être reconnus dans une
identité japonaise, mais se considéraient comme des designers internationaux; bref, qu’ils ne
revendiquaient pas leur origine nippone, mais, au contraire, cherchaient à la gommer. Le fait qu’un
musée des Arts asiatiques puisse s’intéresser à leur travail, me fut-il affirmé, les révulserait par une
connotation vieillotte et passéiste, voire raciste.”
27 Patricia Mears, “The Global Impact of Japanese Fashion in Museums and Galleries exhibiting
Asia,” Fashion Theory 12, 112-113.
28 Ibid., 113.
29 Yohji Yamamoto, from Baudot, Yohji Yamamoto, 13.
30 Yohji Yamamoto, from Menkes, “Yohji Yamamoto: ‘Just Clothes’ from the inside out,”
International Herald Tribune.
31 Carroll and Van Amringe, “French Collection, True to Form,” (n.d.) Yohji Yamamoto in an
interview with the authors: “I tried to mix many kinds of ways to go. Asian, Indonesian print, and
European, that ruffle shape, and finally, Japanese, which is just a sheet, and the material clings like a
monster, like a dirty rag. I don’t want people to call Japanese fashion just one thing only…This bridge
is now becoming very conservative. People begin to think about their own country, their own
nationality, so it’s very dangerous. Let’s mix. Let’s forget about passports, and not become so
nationalistic.”
32 Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones, introduction to The Globalization of
Asian Dress, 2.
33 Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress, 76.
34 Jun I. Kunai cites K. Berger’s Japonisme is Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse (1992, 9)
in Fukai, Japonisme in Fashion, 197.
35 See Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda. Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress and
Fukai, Japonism in Fashion: Japan Dresses the West.
36 Richard Martin, “Our Kimono Mind: Reflections on Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950,”
Journal of Design History 8.
37 Kunai, among others, notes the avant-garde creation of an “international genre of clothing”
(Japonisme in Fashion, 197).
38 Mears, co-curator of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, notes: “The Musée de la
Mode et du Costume (housed in the Palais Galliera) focused solely on the relationship between
Japanese design and French fashion. No Dutch, English, or American pieces appeared as they had in
the original Kyoto venue. In Los Angeles, the curators at the Los Angeles County Museum presented
the fashion material as part of the larger aesthetic story and featured furniture and other decorative arts
objects from that museum’s permanent collection.” (“Exhibiting Asia: The Global Impact of Japanese

Fashion in Museums and Galleries,” 106)
39 Shimizu, “Japan in American Museums – But which Japan?” Art Bulletin, 126. The author
advocates exhibitions on contemporary Japanese art and scholarship focusing on Japan’s total
engagement with Euro-American art and theory.
40 Spindler, “Wenders’ ‘Notebook’ has Yohji Talking,” Designer File, 8.
41 For this helpful information I thank Deirdre Lawrence, chief librarian of the Brooklyn Museum
of Art.
42 Teresa Méndez, “Now in Fashion: Art Museums,” Christian Science Monitor, 2006.
http://www.csmonitor.com/.
43 Trebay, “Mr Yamamoto’s Blue period,” New York Times Magazine.
44 Trebay, “A New Gear for Modern Aristocrats,” The New York Times Magazine.
45 “Exposition Yohji Yamamoto: Toucher, essayer, SVP,” my translation, Bibliothèque Municipale
de Lyon. “Enfin, puisque jusqu’à présent le créateur refusait les expositions car elles ne
correspondaient pas à son principe du rapport au vêtement qu’il veut très direct et vivant” comme
l’explique, Nathalie Ours, coordinatrice des trois expositions.”