Spotlight on Yohji Yamamoto

If you want to tell a story about Yohji Yamamoto, you have to start with his mother. This may seem surprising at first, especially since the fashion designer’s creations have nothing warm, soft or comforting about them. Rather, his creations convey a sense of darkness, an amorphousness, perhaps even something disturbing, but in any case a remoteness from the body, due to the wide cuts, unhemmed edges and often asymmetrical silhouettes. If you want to understand why he once said, “Everything I know, I owe to her,” and to what extent Fumi Yamamoto continues to influence her son today, you have to take a closer look at their respective life stories.

Yohji Yamamoto was born on October 3, 1943, in Yokohama. His father died in a prisoner of war camp when Yohji was just two years old. Like many other war widows in Japan, his mother opened a dressmaking shop, located in Tokyo’s red-light district. Day and night, she would sit at the clattering sewing machine, determined that her child would have a better life. She wanted her only son to study law – a classic. And he obeyed – for a while. In 1962 he enrolled at Keio University in Tokyo to study law, initially with the goal of becoming a prosecutor. After graduating, however, Yamamoto boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway instead of looking for a job. “I didn’t want to become a businessman,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2016, “I wanted to drift, travel around.” Upon his return, he asked his mother if he could help out in the shop.

One can only imagine her shock. It took two weeks before his mother gave him permission to work with her – and only on one condition: he should learn the art of pattern cutting so the seamstresses in her employ wouldn’t make fun of him. In 1966 he enrolled at the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, where his mother had also studied. Yamamoto graduated at the top of his class. It is also worth mentioning that among the nine hundred graduates, there were only two men. The clientele of his mother’s shop was also almost exclusively female. Some came to have dresses made to please their paying husbands, others were mistresses, barmaids or prostitutes. Yamamoto took measurements, drew sketches and sewed by hand. Most of the time, the customers wanted revealing, figure-hugging clothing that would please their men, which didn’t appeal much to Yamamoto. He was surrounded by hard-working women in a patriarchal society. That left its mark. Also important is the fact that Fumi Yamamoto had decided not to remarry. And she dressed only in black, which is not necessarily a color of mourning in Japan, but in any case has a masculine connotation. After all, the samurai usually wore black.

Yamamoto’s fashions suggest that he wanted to protect women, to give them a sort of armor or uniform. He also had a radically different idea of sensuality. It was – and still is today – abstract and at first glance not organic, but always intelligent. One thing that his fashion certainly is not is simple. (...)

→ Read the full interview in rampstyle #34 "On Any Sunday".