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

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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