Yohji Yamamoto's mother was a widow — his father had been killed in the Philippines in 1944, a year after Yohji's birth — and she supported the family by running a dressmaking business in Tokyo. Yamamoto studied law at Keio, refused a career in it, and enrolled at the Bunka Fashion College, graduating in 1969. He founded Y's in 1972 and showed in Paris in April 1981, alongside Rei Kawakubo.

The Paris Reception

The 1981 and 1982 collections — oversized, black, asymmetric, deliberately unfinished — were received in Paris as an ontological provocation. The French couture had been arguing, since the war, that clothing should reveal the body. Yamamoto's clothing concealed it, and the concealment was structural, not coy.

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Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy — but mysterious. But above all black says this: I don't bother you — don't bother me. — Yohji Yamamoto

The Menswear Principle

Yamamoto dresses women in the vocabulary of tailoring traditionally reserved for men. His coats are oversized, his jackets draped, his trousers wide. He has said that he designs by asking: "What would a man do with a woman's garment?" The answer, across forty years, has been: cover her, protect her, and refuse to make her decorative.

The Y-3 collaboration with adidas, founded in 2002, was the first major luxury-sportswear partnership and pre-dates every other designer-sportswear collaboration on the market. The Yamamoto company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009 after over-extension; an Integral Corp. restructuring in 2010 stabilised the operation.

The Wenders Film

Wim Wenders's 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes follows Yamamoto for a season and remains the best single introduction to his method. He is filmed fitting a toile on a model for twelve minutes, speaking little. The garment is constructed through adjustment, unpicking, and reconstruction. The method has not changed.

He is eighty-one at the time of writing and still presents collections in Paris twice a year.