Let’s start with this: Keisuke Yoshida is one of the best womenswear designers of his generation working in Tokyo today. This has become clearer and clearer over the past few seasons, but tonight he confirmed it.
We rode up the cramped elevators of a rather creepy office building to a vast disused hall on the 13th floor. As the models appeared at the far, far end of the room, the slow grumble of what sounded like a jet engine started, and crescendoed into a roar as they approached. Even from afar you could make out the models’ stewardess hats, their swaying hips and stiletto stride, but it took a full minute before they reached us. The anticipation!
When they did they were wearing strictly tailored pencil skirts, lustrous and lightly crumpled blouses in cobalt, black, cream and crimson, and ironically mumsy dark floral prints. Extra fabric from the dresses wrapped tightly around the neck or brushed the floor as trains, and silky nightdresses had connecting jackets that dangled cape-like from the shoulders (more on those later). Later, the crushing music was interspersed with emergency sirens and, at one point, a muffled scream.
Forget the trad wife; Keisuke Yoshida’s woman is the protector, the breadwinner, the teacher, and the mother all at once. Contrast her image with the men this season, on whom the jaunty little hats became infantilizing, their sock suspenders, thigh-high shorts and belted dresses serving to emphasize their softness against the apex women beside them. Maybe it was that the silhouettes this time were sleeker, or the gentle way the fabric clung and creased against the body, but this season Yoshida’s clothing felt more beautiful and more convincing than ever.
Backstage, Yoshida was breathless after having run the length of the hall to take his bow. The easiest of designers to interview, there is no need to ask questions; everything just flows out of him. The muse in his mind, he said, was an imaginary maternal figure he has mentioned before. “Although she’s not my mother, she is somehow like a mother to me. I’ve been thinking recently that the process of making a collection is hard, and so I like to think she’s somewhere worrying about me,” he said. There is also an undeniable sadomasochism about this figure; she is there to punish, but also to kiss it better. “That strictness and sense of love are combined, so even though she looks very stern, there’s also some tenderness there,” he explained.
Yoshida said that this season he’d stopped trying to create something completely new and had instead looked more deeply into the tailored jackets and overcoats that his brand has become known for. “Whenever I create a collection, I first create a mood, then a human figure, and then I start making the shape,” he said. He experimented with cutting a hole in the lining of a jacket and then trying it on the body. “The lining stuck to the body, and it looked like bondage or an elegant dress,” he said, taking off the jacket he was wearing to demonstrate. Sure enough, the sheeny lining inside had been slashed away, transforming into a completely functional dress with the jacket still attached. Unexpected, practical, and also kind of revolutionary. Has it ever been done before? If it has, then certainly not as well as this.
Yoshida said this collection felt akin to shedding his skin. And that seemed to be it. In both himself and in the clothes he makes, Yoshida found an opening and burrowed inside—a caterpillar going into a chrysalis. With this collection he emerged, fully-formed and ready to fly.
