“New winds are blowing,” said Yohji Yamamoto backstage after a beautiful show that drew its colors, patterns and images from the painter’s studio — and the graffiti artist’s paint can — and nodded to the new mood in dressing today.
“When you’re designing for men, you make a shirt, a jacket and pants. But you still have many things to do. How much air do you put between the fabric and the body? Also, market trends always influence me. Today you see young kids starting to wear different clothes. It’s genderless, maybe?”
Silhouettes were loose and the clothes were canvases for much color, pattern, graphic designs and writing. There were leather jackets in shades of petrol, tomato or black painted with the face of a Thirties-era Japanese woman, her hair in a black bob.
Red and white graffiti scribbles, paint splashes or Japanese writing or zips and chains adorned breezy dark suits with cropped trousers. Some suits were awash in smudged, faded paint, like an old artist’s palette, while other devoré velvet ones had graffiti scratched into them, like messages carved on a tree trunk or a wall.
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It wasn’t all about the suit: Yamamoto turned his hand to billowing silk robes and shirts, too. The back of a long and fluid black coat had a red chiaroscuro-like image of a woman, her face lit by candlelight. Genderless? Maybe, but Yamamoto hasn’t lost his sense of romance.