March 5, 2016 |
Yohji Yamamoto didn’t title his collection “Subtraction”, but it was the one word he offered afterwards, backstage, to describe his clothes. You could see a few subtraction a in the show, or lapels being sliced off coats, sometimes of the boundaries between outerwear and dress being removed, fused, like garments that needlepunched wool and leather into a single fused piece of fabric. There was also a subtraction of colour, of pattern, and of volume – a certain streamlining of the silhouette. The reduction, the subtraction, focused your mind on Yamamoto’s superlative tailoring prowess, his exacting eye. His precision.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans