It might be tempting to read a kind of mad romance from this collection. Exceptional manipulations of fabrics—knotted at the bust or below the hips, placed as though torn, assembled in strips, pieced back together—possibly conjured a woman reconstructing a new version of herself from whatever materials she had left around her. The buckled straps dangling extra-long; unreadable words scrawled down leggings; jagged edges jutting out from skirts. The sharp-winged, smoky shadow encircling only one eye and partial lace veils. This show contained the duality of fragility and empowerment that other designers have been exploring this season.
“Very dreamy but also quite dark,” was how renowned pianist Pavel Kolesnikov described the sorrowful-to-sentimental arrangement of Bach, Gluck, Ravel and Japanese compositions that he played live at the edge of the runway until the last section of the show that was accompanied by a recording of Yamamoto sampling Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker. “Vilified, crucified, in the human frame / A million candles burning for the help that never came…”
Where was Yohji Yamamoto taking us this season? Not shuffling off this mortal coil, apparently. He attributed these “broken outfits” to a more naïve source. “Kids, they made it!” he said, smiling and especially upbeat. So then the intention was playful? “Playful, maybe, but it was very hard to play.”
And this was certainly something other than child’s play. Not only did the looks burst forth with different foiled, felted, and floaty textures, they also did not adhere to any conventional notions of construction. Yet the models nestled their hands within cutout bits and were unencumbered by the twisting cords and extended volumes (reimagined hoop skirts, similar to those at Loewe earlier today, channeled the past as envisioned by the future). One standout dress in white lace layered with a dark gauzy pinstripe that extended from a portrait collar to a sweeping train was positively grown-up and gorgeous.
By now, we know that contradictory impulses and expressions are inherent to Yamamoto’s body of work. This is how monochromatic, blobby shapes loosely tacked onto a dress can somehow appear sophisticated, or how swirls of denim and jacquard looked simultaneously opulent and arte povera. Interestingly, the vast variety of fabrics made me think that they had come from years and years of previous collections. Yamamoto’s reply, “Very good and bad question. We made them.”
At this point in his career and his life, and with a yet another book (in collaboration with M/M Paris) debuting Sunday, Yamamoto is still finding ways to challenge himself. It was Picasso who famously said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to draw like a child.” The beauty of this collection was that the complexity and intuition came through in equal measure.
A series of loosely constructed looks in an arresting shade of red brought the show to a somewhat blunt close, almost like a statement unspoken. For architect Jean Nouvel, the collection summoned the kind of beauty that was “at once sober and styled.” The interpretation of a Yamamoto show might always hover in the realm of the subjective. But the admiration—based on the overwhelming applause as the designer took an extended bow with Kolesnikov—well, that is collective.
