September 17, 2024 |
His ashtray arrives before he does; indeed, that’s how you know he’s coming. It’s a heavyweight silver thing, covered in scratches, like an artefact from an alien spaceship.
It’s a cloudy Paris afternoon at the Yohji Yamamoto showroom, a six-storey stone building on Rue Saint-Martin, and I’m here to meet the man whose name is on the door. The clothes from the designer’s SS25 pour homme collection, which he showed to a stiflingly packed audience of press, buyers and celebrities on the white floorboards in this very room only two days prior, now hang on rails around the concrete space. The clipboard-armed staff drift around like shadows.
I’m early – arriving before the ashtray, even – and Yohji Yamamoto (or Yohji-san, as he is known in fashion circles and privately) is, I am told, on his way. There’s some movement at the door and he walks in at 1.55pm sharp. He’s wearing his black Borsalino hat, which covers some of his shoulder-length salt-and- pepper hair. He’s wearing the artful, ancient-looking layers of black cotton and gabardine that he has made his uniform. He sits down at the end of the room and fires up a Hi-Lite cigarette, tapping its ash into the big silver tray.
I’m burdened with the knowledge that an interview with Yohji Yamamoto, who is now 80, is vanishingly precious – the fashion-industry equivalent to being granted a private audience with the Oracle of Delphi. Regarded as one of the greatest-living tailors and an originator of avant-garde fashion, Yamamoto’s career spans five decades, during which he built a global brand with an influence that is hard to overstate. Back in the 1980s, when he first shocked Paris with his revolutionary designs, his sable-clad disciples were dubbed the karasu zoku (or crow tribe), but today his fans include everyone from Gen Z rappers to veteran fashion devotees. They mostly wear black.
After handshakes and small talk, I ride with Yamamoto in a tiny elevator to a meeting room on the third floor, where I sit beside him at the corner of a long wooden table. While we wait for his PR team to get there, I try to break the ice. “How long have you been smoking?”
He raises his eyebrows. “I’ve been doing it since I was 16. I never stopped.”
Beyond the fact that he’s one of a handful of living fashion designers who has survived by sticking hard and fast to a small set of design principles, it’s hard to pin down exactly what makes Yamamoto’s clothing so enduringly magical. Perhaps it’s the seemingly infinite ways he is able to make black fabric sing with life. At his SS25 pour homme show, he cut small squares with scalpel-like incisions in the back of a jacket, which let them flap open like windows. “We needed windows, [because] in summer it’s become very hot recently.
I wanted to make people think about this crazy hotness,” he says. Yamamoto has been thinking about global warming and the darker implications it has for humanity: an illustration of a black sun flames on the thigh of some white culottes, while the phrase ‘Here Comes the Sun’ cascades down a billowy shirt.
Above all, Yamamoto’s clothes are informed by what seems to be an irreconcilably romantic misanthropy. ‘HUMAN CHARACTER IS THE DEMON’ curves over a white pair of shorts this season. On another dress, worn on the runway by renowned British actress Charlotte Rampling, the Japanese kanji for shogyo mujo appears in the designer’s own handwriting. A Buddhist phrase pertaining to the impermanence of all things, in Yamamoto’s mind it reads more like a warning. “It means that human beings can be dangerous anytime,” he says. “So be careful.”
Buddhism, he says, has become part of his life again in recent years. “I still don’t understand and I can’t tell you exactly what Buddhism is, not yet. I’m still studying; maybe until I die I’ll keep on studying,” he says. This has brought him closer to nature, which, following the deaths of his contemporaries in recent years, has become a kind of rival. “I’m fighting with nature,” he says emphatically. “Real nature is always beautiful. Don’t you think so? Like dog, like cat, like plants, like mountain, like rock.
They are so beautiful. I can never create that.” As if to show evidence of this impossible beauty, he takes out his phone to show me his background: it’s a picture of Rin, his beloved akita inu. Her pink tongue is sticking out. “Rin-chan. My favourite dog,” he smiles.
A conversation with Yohji-san is a kaleidoscopic experience. It meanders seamlessly from cheeky anecdotes to colossal depths. The designer speaks with a grand and deliberate slowness, dispatching dramatic silences like a slam poet. But then he’ll switch, quick and sly as a fox, flicking on the mischief, and show his inner provocateur. “I hate politicians,” he says gleefully. “My challenge is always against society. The reason I’m still alive is that I chose my mother’s job as a dressmaker, an outfit maker. That gave me [the power] to resist and get angry with society. It’s a very nice anger.”
Is there any advice he has for the next generation, or can he tell me what he sees that they are lacking? “It’s very simple,” he says with a grin. “Get angry more!”
The source of the designer’s own enmity is well documented. Born on October 3, 1943, Yamamoto says his earliest memories are of the aftermath of WWII; he spent his childhood in the ruins of Tokyo with his mother, a widowed dressmaker. “When I was about three or four years old, I asked my mother, ‘Hey Mum, why don’t I have my father?’ She told me that at the end of the Second World War he was pulled [drafted] by the army,” he says. He was killed. “Naturally, I got angry [about] his fate. So, at four or five years old kid, I started to hate adults,” he says, laughing. “I still do.”
In the many decades since, Yamamoto has set himself apart as the near-mythical fashion designer who has managed to remain committed to his own design language – beloved by everyone from the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy to Elton John – and, somehow, reinvents it each season. “The only point I suffer with is how to change, how to be new, how to be different from the last one,” he says. “I ask myself, ‘Why don’t you continue the same thing for ever, each time?’ Then I answer myself. ‘[Because] the audience will be boooored.” Still, he pushes on. “I’m always asking myself, should I continue as a fashion designer? Or should I change my method?” Has he found an answer? “Not yet. Getting no answer, that’s what keeps me alive. If I find another method, I’d be dead,” he says.
Does he feel pressure from his audience, then, to keep impressing them, with clothes, with endless pearls of wisdom? He sighs. Like many great artists who produce life-affirming work, Yamamoto finds the outsized expectations from his fans suffocating. “They misunderstand who I am. They make an image of me their way: ‘Yohji is like this.’ I hate it!” he says. “Making clothing, it’s like a kid playing. As human beings, we can be anything, but I’m pushed to be their Yohji.”
Who is your Yohji?
“That’s a very good question. Hard question,” he says. He slides out another Hi-Lite, then summons the flame from his lighter. He lights it, takes a drag. The smoke drifts up slowly from his hand, swirling in wisps around him like an aura. I wait – will he crack out another of his enigmatic Yohji-isms to throw to the masses? His wise eyes gleam like onyx. “I don’t know,” he says, smiling gently. “I have no solution.”
Issue 73 of 10 Magazine – RISING, RENEW, RENAISSANCE – is on newsstands September 18. Pre-order your copy here.
YOHJI YMAMOTO: SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Photographer KASIA WOZNIAK
Fashion Editor GARTH ALLDAY SPENCER
Text ASHLEY OGAWA CLARKE
Model MIKA SCHNEIDER at Elite Models
Hair MICHAEL BUI at Walter Schupfer Management
Make-up LLOYD SIMMONDS at Agence Carole
Photographer’s assistant GABRIELE LE GLAUNEC
Fashion assistants GLORIJA GZIMAILAITE
Casting SIX WOLVES
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU and SONYA MAZURYK
Clothing and accessories throughout by YOHJI YAMAMOTO
