Don’t count on Yohji Yamamoto to give a definitive summation of his spring collection, with its silhouettes that seemed to hover between creation and unraveling. Backstage, when quizzed about what it all meant, he said it was “just fringes.”
They were everywhere: streaking down from wired curve in his sculptural and glamorous opening silhouettes, tying together others that seemed patchworked from constrasting irregular panels, and adorning shoulders like military braids coming undone.
Some turned simple tailored looks sexier, by baring the midriff. Other examples wrapped the body in geometric lattices or whorls of strands.
A handful of tailored coats looked like the weft had vanished from their fabric, leaving only the warp swinging freely. Even knitwear seemed to ease from solid colors into transparency, giving the impression of threads left hanging.
Just fringes indeed, but from someone who isn’t just any designer.
And in case you’re wondering if it was the process that he enjoyed, his answer to that was categorically that “all the time, process is suffering.” As for finding satisfaction in the result? “Never,” he said with finality.
The usual ping-pong of questions eventually turned up that his interest lay in the repetition of process and craft. Whether it was about fringes turning into fabric or the other way around was “up to you,” Yamamoto said.
Since he invited interpretations, those intricate constructions brought to mind that, in the age of artificial intelligence and digital realities, the hands that remember how to make them still matter most.
The way they wrapped the female form also suggested the importance of the body and how to flatter it without imposing a particular shape. Sensuality was always suggested and never depended on exposing skin either.
As the conversation meandered, Yamamoto told the gaggle of editors to take a good long look at their own unclothed form: “It’s beautiful,” he said. In a moment where body inclusivity has all but vanished from the runways, that sounded like a radical statement.
