Yohji Yamamoto: In the Wake of an Invitation

Sometimes an invitation says more than a collection’s first look.

HAKAN BAHAR

When I opened Yohji Yamamoto’s black envelope, Caravaggio was waiting for me. It was a detail taken from The Musicians. At first glance, everything belonged to four hundred years ago: heavy white fabrics, the depth of red velvet, faces gently touched by light… Then my eye fell on the shoulder of one of the figures. A black tattoo inked on bare skin quietly disturbed the painting’s stillness. That tiny intervention erased, in an instant, the distance between past and present. It was as if Yamamoto had already written the first sentence of his collection on the invitation: not to reproduce the past, but to rethink it on the body of today.

On the day of the show, I was wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier top and Yohji Yamamoto trousers, both chosen from my own vintage collection. At first glance, the Gaultier piece looked like an abstract pattern. But looking more closely, a layered composition emerged, in which colours flowed gently into one another and fine white threads wandered across the fabric, tracing invisible paths. Patches of blue, red and pale yellow seemed to have broken away from a fresco worn by time and settled on the cloth. The threads did not merely embellish the image; they redrew it. No line was ever completed, no colour existed on its own. There was an unexpected kinship between the Caravaggio on the invitation and the Gaultier I was wearing. One with paint, the other with thread, both were rebuilding the same memory.

When I arrived at the venue, the street-style photographers waiting at the entrance began photographing me one shot after another. In the moment, I gave it no thought. But later, when I saw my photograph published in WWD Japan, I thought back to that day. I was wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier top and Yohji Yamamoto trousers from my own vintage collection. In that photograph, I saw not only what I was wearing, but the thought that had been running through my mind all day.

As I entered the hall, I instinctively raised my head towards the ceiling. Long white lights running parallel to one another built a second architecture between the raw concrete columns. Rather than lighting the space, they shaped it; even before the first model stepped onto the runway, they made the shoulders, the silhouettes and the volume of the fabric visible. Here, as on Caravaggio’s canvas, light existed not only so that we could see, but to reveal form.

As the show went on, it became clear that the shoulder was the true subject of this collection. Softened in one look, sharpened in the next, it sometimes became an almost collapsed volume, and sometimes took on a powerful, armour-like silhouette. These forms, reminiscent of nineteenth-century tailoring, were never nostalgic. Yamamoto was not reviving the past; he was reinterpreting it on the body of today. In his hands, tailoring ceased to be a fixed structure and became a living form that moves with the body.

This transformation could be felt not only in the cuts, but in the materials. The heavy layers that have for years been Yohji Yamamoto’s signature had this time taken on a more permeable, lighter character. Long coats pierced with metal eyelets, boots opened up with mesh panels and high-ankled shoes turned the heat of summer into part of the design. As the show progressed, grey patterns emerging from the black, deep red flowers, lace shirts, trailing red threads and, towards the finale, the gleam of copper and silver threads lent the collection an unexpected fragility. Strength and grace, hardness and lightness completed one another within the same silhouette.

Perhaps this is precisely the most enchanting thing about fashion. It does not preserve the past as it is; it gives it a new body in which to breathe again. For me, writing about fashion means pursuing exactly this. I try to read not a garment, but the memory it carries; not a silhouette, but the stories that have touched one another across the centuries.