HG HOMMAGE: YOHJI

As a boy, Yamamoto filled solitary hours drawing and painting. He read novels. An aunt encouraged him to play music. He went to university and studied law, but on the side he played in a band. He was not cut out for the life of a salaryman. Upon graduating, to his mother’s dismay, he asked her if he could work with her in her shop. She agreed, reluctantly, but not without first sending him back to school to learn the craft, lest the sewing girls reject him.

 

The model Carolyn Murphy, walking the S/S 96 runway in Paris. Yamamoto was motivated by a desire to create men’s clothes for women, and this has become the narrative thread of his work. While his collections often challenge the conventions of gender, they unapologetically embrace the masculine and the feminine. Androgyny, he has said, does not have any meaning in his philosophy.

This was a time before ready-to-wear, and women would come into the shop with images of dresses on pages torn from magazines. “My duty was to make sexy silhouette for women who came to my mother’s atelier,” Yamamoto has recalled. More often than not, a man picked up the tab. “I was shouting in my mind, Bitch! I couldn’t stand designing bitches clothing. I was searching for some independent women. I started thinking that maybe I’m going to create the outfit for independent women who is not doll for man. This is my very start of designing clothing.”

His S/S 97 “Hommage à la Couture” took on the icons of fashion with witty and light-handed riffs on Chanel tweeds and Dior’s New Look. The show closed with this rare sunshine yellow dress — and a standing ovation. A thousand ways of looking at a white shirt: A dress from S/S 00 (bottom, center) and a pleated detail from S/S 05 (far right).  A look from A/W 86-87 (left) reimagined for A/W 24-25 (bottom right). Early on, Yamamoto made a practice of destroying his runway samples. But he hung on to the patterns, and would use them as a means to rediscover his own work.

Yamamoto designed costumes for several films by the director Takeshi Kitano, including “Brother,” an old fashioned yakuza gangster film set in Los Angeles, and “Dolls,” (above) a trio of tragic love stories.

The world of Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme is not strictly a men’s club. Casting of the runway presentations has included Hannah O’Neill (above), a dancer with Paris Opera Ballet, and the actress Charlotte Rampling (right) who has worn his clothes for decades.

The A/W 98-99 collection culminated in a wedding dress the size of a wedding tent (below), worn on t the runway by the model Jodie Kidd, whose equally voluminous hat was kept aloft by a quartet of ushers. It was a rare moment of spectacle for a designer who said he preferred the intimacy of couture week, where you could hear the rustling of the fabric. The following season, Yamamoto would present an entire collection on the theme of Widows and Brides (bottom). You can’t become a widow without being first a bride, he pointed out. The wedding dress and the widow dress are the two sides of the same coin.

Intrinsic to this idea was that the clothes should be made to last, to stand the test of time but also the whims of fashion. “I wanted people to keep on wearing my clothes for at least ten years or more, so I requested the fabric maker to make a very strong, tough finish,” he has said.

Yamamoto launched his Y’s collection in the ‘70s with a radical idea: to make men’s clothes for women. He started with coats. From the beginning, his silhouettes were commodious and masculine. “I was born in a very bad moment in Japan,” Yamamoto said in the catalog for an exhibition of his work at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. “There was no food to feed babies, so my generation of people are very small. So naturally I am angry about my size, so I design big sizes.” Beyond that, he said, he wanted to protect the clothes themselves from fashion, and at the same time protect the woman’s body from something – maybe from the eyes of men or a cold wind. (Or as he once coyly suggested to the fashion critic Suzy Menkes, maybe he just wanted to create enough space to imagine what was going on underneath.)

The relationship between Max Vadukul and Yohji Yamamoto goes back to the early 80s, when, having been brought in by the art director Marc Ascoli, Vadukul shot Yamamoto’s F/W 84-85 collection on the mean streets of New York City (above). Back then, the young photographer didn’t even have an agent, but he would go on to collaborate with Yamamoto for several seasons, and his gritty, guerilla style epitomized the spirit of the Y’s collection. Yamamoto and Vadukal reunited for A/W 23-24, this time on the streets of Paris (opposite). The new series of images pick up where they left off, without missing a beat.

Yamamoto showed his women’s collection in Paris for the first time 1981, followed by his men’s collection a few years later. Back then, he was lumped in with other designers from Japan, including the Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo, who was his lover at the time. The clothes were famously disparaged as “Hiroshima Chic.”

But Yamamoto, who always identified as a Tokyo boy, had never thought of himself as Japanese, the way that certain New Yorkers don’t think of themselves as American. He had rejected the traditions of his native culture, the codes of fashion more generally, and was forging a new vision of women, with clothes that were not about women’s bodies so much as their minds, their emotions, their lives.

Perhaps ironically, his men’s collection, Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme, was created in direct response to the clothes he was designing for women. He recalled, only half joking, that people told him that boys were afraid of the ladies wearing his outfits. The clothes were menacing, they were all black, they revealed practically nothing. Yamamoto gave men their own sort of armor, so that they might be brave enough to approach the Yohji women.

Milestones: The “Inuit” collection A/W 00-01 (far left), “ Hommage à la Couture” S/S 97 (below), The “Cubist” collection A/W 24-25 (second from right), and A/W 01-02, the prelude to the launch of Y-3, his groundbreaking collaboration with Adidas, and arguably, the birth of athleisure. As the story goes, Yamamoto was concerned that he was no longer seeing his clothes being worn on the streets, and concluded that he had no choice but to join “sneaker life.” He reached out to Adidas with a proposal, and the rest is history. A bonus of working with the German sports brand, he told WWD, was that he now had an excuse to design his own T-shirts, and would no longer have to be dependent on Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein for them. 

Fashion giant André Leon Tally, walking arm-in-arm with a model in Yamamoto’s seminal wedding collection, themed Widows and Brides, to the tune of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’aime - Moi Non Plus.” Was Tally the father of the bride? A bride himself? Yamamoto, not one to stand on ceremony, left this open to interpretation in a presentation brimming with joy and charged with subtext. One of the greatest runway shows of all time. And as with most weddings, there was not a dry eye in the house.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy (below), whose chic, minimalist style was obsessively documented in the fashion press throughout the ‘90s, wearing not Calvin Klein but (surprise!) Yohji Yamamoto, and elegantly defying the stereotype of the Yohji woman as a “black crow.” The designer admired the American beauty from afar, dubbing a runway look inspired by her “Madame Kennedy.”

Among his many firsts, Yamamoto was the first designer invited to create a bag with Hermès. The “Yohji” — a flat satchel with messenger bag practicality — made its debut in his F/W 08 women’s collection and was available from the French house by special order.  Getty Images / Chris Moore

On a trip to London with his then girlfriend Rei Kawakubo, Yamamoto paid an eye-opening visit to SEX, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s paean to punk on the Kings Road. Years later, in 1998, Westwood would walk the Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme runway (above), underscoring the mutual admiration of two rebel spirits. “If you’re a good designer, you appreciate and love the work of another good designer,” she told Another magazine, point blank. Yamamoto always believed that when it came to dressing, women had far more freedom than their male counterparts. “Men have stupid rule, they have to obey. Like an army soldier.” He is famously not a fan of ties and scoffs at social norms that require them. “The necktie is the worst object, it looks so ugly,” he insists. Apparently this “stupid rule” did not apply to Westwood, who wore a handful of looks in the show, including a pair of commodious trousers, held up by suspenders, that engulfed her like a boa constrictor swallowing a lioness.  Getty Images / Bertrand Rindoff Petroff

 

Left: Yohji Yamamoto and Wim Wenders on set for the “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” documentary, 1989. Right: Yohji Yamamoto and Pina Bausch in Wuppertal, Germany; 1998. 

Over the years, Yamamoto has found kinship with other artists, including the choreographer Pina Bausch (above) and the director Wim Wenders (left). In 1989, he worked with Wenders on Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a film for the Georges Pompidou Museum. In one scene early on, as the two men partake in a friendly but very competitive game of pool, Wenders tries to wrap his head around his enigmatic new friend. “My first encounter with Yohji Yamamoto was in a way an experience of identity. I bought a shirt and a jacket. In the mirror, I saw me of course, only better. More me than before, and I had the strangest sensation. This jacket reminded me of my childhood and of my father as if the essence of this memory were tailored into it. What did Yamamoto know about me? About everybody?”

A sketch by Yohji Yamamoto. The d designer came of age at a time when Western influences over Japan put a premium on career stability over creativity, and studied law before working for his mother in her dressmaking shop. He has always said that if he were not a designer, that he would probably have become a full time artist or musician — something “free.”

For his own part, Yohji Yamamoto has settled into a uniform: “I’m always wearing same outfit. Black became my uniform finally. Sometimes I wear jeans, blue jeans. Day by day, year by year, I became lazy to choose another color. So, the reason why I’m always like that at 80s is because I’m tired of being charming.” To this day, he refuses to think of himself as a fashion designer. “If I have to say simple in just one word: I hate fashion. For a long time I was working for the title in myself,  but simply I’m a dressmaker. That’s it.” He is a black belt in karate, he’s a pool shark (don’t bet against him), he plays guitar and harmonica and sings the blues like nobody’s business. He says if he weren’t a designer he’d be a musician, an artist, “something free.” (Or has he recently told Purple magazine, he might very well be in prison.) “Being free is very difficult,” he says. “You have the responsibility to find yourself: who you are, how you are.”

Irish boys in Connemara wearing white shirts from the A/W 93-94 Y’s for Men collection, photographed by Ferdinando Scianna. The photographer followed up with another series for Y’s in 1994, shot in Andalusia, Spain.

Yohji Yamamoto hates the thought of retrospectives (clothes in a museum? “That’s so boring to me.”) Or for that matter, homages, like this one. But according to his studio director, Caroline Fabre, who worked with him in the early days and recently rejoined the company, Yamamoto was intrigued by the idea of HommeGirls — a concept that he himself arguably dreamed up, so many decades ago, sitting at his mother’s side in her dressmaking shop. Yamamoto has created more than 500 collections, and yet he shows no signs of retiring, or of looking back. On the contrary, it seems that he still finds purpose, happiness, and maybe even something like peace, in being in the studio, in cutting the fabric, in designing beautiful clothes — and strength in the women who wear those clothes, and who bring them to life.

 

“He gave me the keys to the car,” says the creative director Marc Ascoli, whose work on the designer’s seasonal catalogs with Nick Knight, Paolo Roversi, David Sims (this page), Craig McDean and others greatly influenced not just the look of Yohji Yamamoto, but of fashion photography more generally. The creative polymaths Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag of M/M Paris, whose very first fashion commission was an invitation for a Yohji Yamamoto store opening, were responsible for the distinctive art direction and catalog design in the late 90s. They recently reconnected with Yohji Yamamoto on “Perspective Libre,” a visual exploration of the A/W 24-25 “Cubist” collection (opposite), photographed by Julien Martinez Leclerc and styled by Joe McKenna. Included is a vinyl record with songs by Yohji-san — a personal soundtrack to this one-of-a-kind publication. Stella Tennant for Yohji Yamamoto Autumn/Winter 1995 campaign. Photographed by David Sims.

 

M/M x Yohji Yamamoto Fall/Winter 2024 catalogue. Photograph by Julien Martinez Leclerc.

 

All images courtesy @YOHJI YAMAMOTO Inc. Unless otherwise stated.

 

May 2025