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

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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 6
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 7
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Page 17 and 18: www.textilemuseum.org/exhibitions/u

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