The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  Unlike the other designers who changed both fashion in Japan and the world’s perception of Japanese fashion, Rei Kawakubo had no formal training. Born in Tokyo in 1942, the daughter of a professor at Keio University, a respected private institution, she started school in a defeated, occupied country and was part of the flowering of talent prompted by the post-war economic boom and the gradually widened horizons that came with it. She studied both Japanese and Western art at her father’s university and, on graduating in 1964, went to work in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a major chemical company which was Japan’s biggest producer of acrylic fibres. In producing promotional material for print and television advertising intended to give acrylic a fashionable image, Kawakubo became a stylist, one of Japan’s first. Three years later, alienated by the paternalism traditional within Japanese companies, she became the first freelance stylist. However, gradually she became aware that styling would not satisfy her urge to stretch her imagination for very long. She had invented the Comme des Garçons label (because she liked the way it sounded) for the clothes she designed and made for the advertisements she styled and by 1973 she had established a company and began to make clothes for sale. ‘It wasn’t a major decision,’ she said. ‘Working as a stylist my responsibility was very small compared with that of the art director and the photographer. I became frustrated with what I was doing and wanted to do more.’ She does not regret her lack of formal training. ‘If you can afford to take the time to train your eye and develop a sense of aesthetics in a natural way, it has a lot to recommend it.’

  If Comme des Garçons had a certain ring to it, it also seemed appropriate for the simplicity of the clothes she was making, clothes which took a masculine wardrobe as a distant starting point. Interviewed by Geraldine Ranson of the Sunday Telegraph in 1983, she said, ‘Most men don’t like women who are capable of working hard. They do not like strong independent women with their feet on the ground.’ She did not expect men outside the fashion industry to understand her clothes. ‘It’s not cute or soft and it doesn’t fit a man’s image of a woman.’ But then, as she had told Mary Russell of Vogue in 1982, ‘I do not find clothes that reveal the body sexy.’

  In 1975 Kawakubo showed her first womenswear collection in Tokyo and began her collaboration with the architect Takao Kawasaki to develop a very particular identity for her shops. She also produced the first of a series of catalogues which enabled her to disseminate images of her clothes styled as she wished them to be seen. ‘I try to reflect my approach not just in the clothes, but in the accessories, the shows, the shops, even in my office. You have to see it as a total impression and not just look at the exposed seams and black.’

  In 1978 she launched Homme, her menswear collection; it was followed by Tricot and Robe de Chambre in 1981 and Noir in 1987. The biggest step, however, was in 1981 when, in order to gain recognition internationally, she took her collection to show at the Intercontinental Hotel Paris—to mixed reviews, some bewildered, some dismissive. However, both she and Yohji Yamamoto (the pair had been lovers) were invited to present a catwalk show the following season, the first time the Chambre Syndicale had ever extended such an invitation to foreign designers. Kawakubo showed an asymmetric monochrome collection which included trousers with sweater cuffs at the ankles topped with hybrid tunic/shawls, voluminous overcoats buttoned left to right comme des garçons and boiled-wool knits with the neck hole cut into the chest or the shoulder so that, on the body, the garments made gauche but intriguingly eccentric, abstract shapes. There was no music, just a noise like a train clanging over points, and the models, their make-up dark, hungry-looking and out-of-synch with the features of their impassive faces, moved sedately, joylessly.

  These clothes were at first sight puritanically austere and intellectual. Fashion was going through a stale patch, repeating itself, and the only hope for rejuvenation appeared to be young London. However, those who were there on that evening will never forget the shock and the delight. Shock because no one had made clothes like this before; and delight because although they appeared to espouse a deliberately ugly anti-aesthetic, they were strangely compelling and demanded that one did more than react with the senses; they insisted that you think about them. In 1984 Leonard Koren described Kawakubo as having the purest, most uncompromising and strongest avant-garde vision of all the designers to come to prominence in the 1970s. From the 1990s onwards, you are much more likely to find hand-painted crinoline ball gowns than dark, torn shrouds in her collections. In 1983, however, she gravely told Geraldine Ranson that her taste for working exclusively in black and white had remained unchanged for ten years or so.

  In the early days of a palette of various shades of black, she wryly acknowledged the inherent weakness of her method. ‘I realised clothes have to be worn and sold to a certain number of people. That’s the difference between being a painter or sculptor and a clothing designer. It is, in a sense, a very commercial field. Unfortunately my collections tend to be very concentrated and focused on very few ideas and this is a commercial problem. I try to get more variety. But I can’t; it’s not my way.’

  Fortunately it has become her way. Each collection is indeed focused but Kawakubo is an instinctive innovator, constantly challenging her own ingenuity. Having worked through her initial preoccupation with the structure of clothes, she turned her attention to surface and colour. The creation of her collections depends very much on a series of collaborations with key creatives. She has famously said that with every collection, ‘I start from zero.’ Hiroshi Matsushita of the Orimono Kenkyu Sha textile company was an early contributor, developing fabrics in response to Kawakubo’s questions, suggestions, thoughts and moods. Deyan Sudjic wrote in 1990, ‘It was Matsushita, for example, who devised the rayon criss-crossed with elastic that allowed Kawakubo to make the garments in the women’s collection of 1984 bubble and boil as though they were melting. And it was Matsushita who formulated the bonded cotton rayon and poly-urethane fabric Kawakubo used for her asymmetric dresses of 1986.’

  Her method of work is often more about whim and mischief than any straining after pre-imagined effects. She told Leonard Koren, ‘The machines that make fabric are more and more making uniform, flawless textures. I like it when something is off, not perfect. Hand weaving is the best way to achieve this. Since this isn’t always possible, we loosen a screw of the machines here and there so they can’t do exactly what they’re supposed to do.’

  The fabric is a continuous journey of experiment because, as Matsushita told Sudjic, ‘She never likes to do anything twice, so to meet her requirements the mills have had to come up with techniques that have not been tried before; they have had to invent new fabrics. Lately the words she uses [as her starting point] have been softer, a little sweeter. Maybe she has mellowed; it’s reflected in the language and in the fabrics.’

  With the fabric in place, Kawakubo then works with her large team of pattern-cutters. ‘Some designers,’ she told Sudjic. ‘produce detailed sketches and have a pattern made that is based directly on them. I begin with a much more abstract drawing and the pattern-makers need to be able to interpret what I am trying to do. They help me to design.’

  In 1996 she showed for spring/summer 1997 a collection which perplexed even her most die-hard admirers. Known to Kawakubo as ‘Dress Becomes Body Becomes Dress,’ and to everyone else as the collection of the humps, it distorted skinny, body-hugging clothes in bright spring colours with a series of protuberances that appeared to be attached like some alien limpet-like succubus to random spots around the body, occasionally growing elongated and tyre-like to embrace the waist or hips. There were also waxed brown-paper puffball skirts and fantastically rosette-pleated tops and jackets in Prince-of-Wales check and pretty, girlish gingham. An uncomfortable crowd shuffled out muttering about the Quasimodo Collection and what do you call the particular political incorrectness that mocks deformity? The collection sold, the clothes were great talking pieces and then great collector’s pi
eces and Kawakubo continued to experiment, her reputation undamaged.

  In 1995 she said, ‘I don’t think my clothes have changed enormously over the years, though I hope I always change in the sense of making progress. In the past perhaps I was more obvious about exposing construction techniques. I used patterns that were very complex; I found that a passion. Now I am more interested in the general mood of a collection.’ Observers and collaborators do keep reflecting that they think she has ‘mellowed’ over the years and her marriage to Adrian Joffé, a South African–born architect who is managing director of her company, may have something to do with that.

  If the mood of those earlier collections was sombre and aggressive in its confrontation of the fashion world’s expectations, the mood of her mature years is much more light-hearted with a strong bias towards Western shapes. But they are shapes transformed by Kawakubo’s unique sense of architecture, her intellectual distancing from her medium and, the factor it was so easy to miss at the beginning, a playful sensuality which lies in tactility and abstract form, a garment’s movement on the body whether it flows or, stiff and static, merely changes in silhouette as the wearer turns and moves.

  Further reading: Deyan Sudjic’s monograph, Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons (1990), is a must-read.

  36 YOHJI YAMAMOTO (1943–)

  Yohji Yamamoto’s aim is to synthesise the traditional understated Japanese aesthetic—with its emphasis on simplicity and purity of response—and what he perceives as the more ‘human’, body-oriented Western tradition. Less disciplined than Miyake, he casts his net wider in his search for a vocabulary of shapes and textures to express that strange amalgam of intellectualism and sensuality that is uniquely his. Those witnessing a Yamamoto show are uneasily aware that a mental adjustment is required, is in fact irresistible. These clothes are not there to display the body; the body is there to display the structure, the harmonies and the sometimes harshly discordant unorthodoxies of the clothes. ‘For me,’ said Yamamoto, ‘the body is nothing. The body is change. Every moment it gets older so you cannot count on it. You cannot control time. I can’t believe in the human body. I do not think the human body is beautiful.’

  The traditional Japanese approach to dress, as demonstrated in the many layered kimonos that make up a formal ceremonial outfit, is not about the body; it is about the shape the clothes assume on the body—hierarchic, imposing in the case of men and dignified, modest, adorned in the case of women—and the colour and surface texture. The latter is historically a matter of weave, pattern and embroidery. The body is treated like a sculptor’s armature, the metal skeleton the artist will clothe in clay. In fact, the sculpture analogy is a good one; not only does Yamamoto tend to think of himself functioning within the ranks of artists, but his design handwriting is sculptural, plastic, his clothes very much things of curves, planes and tactile volume, of fragments of geometric shapes. Like Miyake, who had been showing successfully in Paris for a decade when Yamamoto and Kawakubo first showed there, Yamamoto is preoccupied with the texture of fabrics and the potential of large, abstract, asymmetric shapes to display it. With Kawakubo, Yamamoto started a look which was consistent to a large degree with the work being produced at that time by the avant-garde designers of Britain and which became known, just as derogatively, as ‘bag lady chic’. His method is a more intellectually purposeful postmodern than the methods of Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano, but there is a connection.

  Although Yamamoto is drawn again and again to the strict tailored curves of the fin de siècle—often topping his ingeniously cut and gathered up long skirts and long narrow jackets with the vast lampshadelike tulle and organza hats of the period—they are more of an insistent backbeat than the melody. He is, as François Boudot points out in his book in the Fashion Memoir series, ‘exceptionally responsive to contemporary trends—in the same way that couturiers of preceding generations responded to Cubism, say, or the Ballets Russes or Pop Art.’ Boudot identifies Arte Povera, work pulled together from detritus—rags, wood shavings, mud, coal—as a major influence on Yamamoto’s approach. He, says, Boudot, ‘… tried to break away from a fossilised conception of what clothes were. He did this by disrupting the codes by which clothes made their appeal; by rethinking the glamorous signals sent out by their external appearance; by redefining their relationship with the male or female body; and, ultimately—to near universal incomprehension—by radically reinterpreting the respective contributions of beauty and ugliness, past and future, memory and modernity.’

  When Geraldine Ranson of the Sunday Telegraph visited Tokyo in 1982, she remarked that on Yamamoto’s labels was printed the statement, ‘There is nothing so boring as a neat and tidy look.’ In 2002, in Talking to Myself with Carla Sozzani, Yamamoto wrote, ‘I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.’ Indeed, although they may be evocatively beautiful, there is often something uneasily disjointed about his sombrely dramatic clothes, something reminiscent of some moody forgotten dream one once woke from, vaguely disturbed, and, for that reason, they are loved by adherents of the Goth subcultural style.

  Born in Tokyo in 1943, Yohji Yamamoto was brought up by his mother, Fumi, who was widowed by the Second World War and worked for sixteen hours a day as a dressmaker to pay for her son’s education. He initially took a law degree at Keio University (where Rei Kawakubo was studying at the same time) but decided he wanted to work with his mother in her dressmaking business. She—who had dreamed of an important career in the law for him—agreed on the condition he train for the job at the famous Bunka School. He still remembers his discomfort at being the only boy in his class and the oldest student by far. He graduated in 1969, winning a competition for a trip to Paris—where he managed to survive for eight months on no money, observing, learning and haunting the Left Bank boutiques. He returned to Tokyo, and, in 1971, he started his own business, the Y’s Company Ltd. He did not show on a catwalk until 1977, when he already had a strong following. In Japan the women who wore his black clothes were already known as ‘crows’. ‘The samurai spirit is black,’ said Yamamoto. ‘The samurai must be able to throw his body into nothingness, the colour and image of which is black.’

  In 1981 he and his colleague and former lover, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, set the fashion world on its ears when they showed in Paris. Many commentators loathed what they called ‘Holocaust Chic’ or ‘Post-Hiroshima Style’, but many others loved the challenge it offered to conventional ways of thinking about fashion. In Libération, under the headline, ‘French fashion has found its masters: the Japanese,’ Michel Cresson wrote, ‘The outfits he offers us in 1982 for us to wear in the next 20 years are infinitely more feasible than those proposed by Courrèges and Cardin in around 1960 for the year 2000, which today look as old-hat as a Soviet sci-fi film.’

  In 1984 Yamamoto told Nicholas Coleridge:

  There was a moment when the Paris Prêt-a-Porter looked set to die. It had run out of ideas. Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, what they were doing was almost couture; it was so restricted. Then we went to Paris and it happened, the spirit of our clothes was free. Marie-Claire were the first to understand, yes, they had the first understanding … In fashion I think there is always a feeling of anti-something. In magazines they think anti, anti, anti. They like a certain look for a time, then they are anti it; not indifferent but anti. In 1981 they were anti western clothes, so they needed and accepted us, and tried to understand my concept of sexuality. I don’t feel sexuality at all in the normal meaning. A fantasy of mine is a woman, 40 or 50 years old. She is very skinny with grey hair and smoking a cigarette. She is neither a woman nor a man but she is very attractive. She is sexy for me. She is walking away from me and as I walk after her she calls out, ‘No, Yohji, do not follow.’

  In 1984, in the first of the many new collections he has developed over the years, Yamamoto deconstructed and reconstructed men’s clothing, creating a new classicism—sev
ere white shirts, puny-shouldered dark suits with three-button jackets with narrow lapels and slender trousers. Embraced rapidly by the artistic intelligentsia, the look powerfully influenced menswear for a decade. More than most designers, Yamamoto is interested in the contribution the wearer makes. ‘Whether a season’s fashion is interesting or not does not depend on the designers who created it, but on those who see it and buy it.’ His men’s clothes as much as his women’s have always attracted a particularly interesting wearer, one that responds to the boldness of his intention and the subtlety of its execution, to the seriousness of his approach to design—which many of them share—and to the lightness, mischief and wit that can always be found at the heart of the collection. He told Boudot in 1997:

  Making a garment means thinking about people. I am always eager to meet people and talk to them. It’s what I like more than anything else. What are they doing? What are they thinking? How do they lead their lives? And then I can set to work. I start with the fabric, the actual material, the ‘feel’ of it, I then move on to the form. Possibly what counts most for me is the feel. And then when I start working on the material, I think my way into the form it ought to assume.

  His collaboration with Adidas was one of the first and most successful between a cutting-edge designer and a mass-market brand. It was carefully chosen of course. The trainer was modern, fit for its purpose from a purist’s point of view and, above all, an iconic item of clothing in the mainstream and across a range of subcultures. Best of all, its origins lie in Western campus sports, making it something Yamamoto, an outsider to all those things, could have a lot of fun with. Of all the Japanese designers he is perhaps the most in denial about the influence his own culture has had on his work—even though some of his most beautiful clothes are largely sourced from what appear to be cannibalised kimonos. ‘I happen to have been born in Japan. But I’ve never labelled myself in that way,’ he has said. He was always rather impatient with the fashion press’s somewhat bewildered initial tendency to lump Japanese designers together into a school or movement and its assumption that this must be the way all Japanese women were dressing. He said, ‘People talk about the Japanese as if they’re all together in some kind of designers’ mafia. In Japan, maybe they’re popular somewhere at the edge of things. But it’s got nothing to do with ordinary people.’