As a new V&A one-man show opens the Japanese designer reflects on his thirty year career in fashion.The fashion world hardly knew what to make of Yohji Yamamoto's extraordinary alternative vision of fashion when he first showed his clothes on the Paris catwalks in 1981. Three decades later, it's a different story. Yohji is lionised not just as a fashion great but as a guru and an artist by his peers.
This exhibition explores the work of idiosyncratic and ground-breaking designer Yohji Yamamoto. Fabric, he said, 'is everything'. This deep interest in textiles is at the heart of his approach to design.
Yamamoto became internationally renowned in the early eighties for challenging traditional notions of fashion by designing garments that seemed oversized, unfinished, played with ideas of gender or fabrics not normally used in fashionable attire such as felt or neoprene. Other works revealed Yamamoto's unusual pattern cutting, knowledge of fashion history and sense of humour. His work is characterised by a frequent and skilful use of black, a colour which he describes as 'modest and arrogant at the same time.
