It may be tempting to read some kind of crazy romance from this collection. Exceptional manipulations of fabrics – knotted at the bust or below the hips, placed as if torn, pieced together in strips, put back together again – may have conjured up a woman reconstructing a new version of herself from the materials she had around her left behind. The buckle straps dangle extra long; illegible words scrawled on leggings; serrated edges protruding from the skirts. The sharp-winged, smoky shadow surrounding only one eye and partially lace veils. This show captured the duality of vulnerability and empowerment that other designers have explored this season.
‘Very dreamy but also quite dark’ is how the well-known pianist Pavel Kolesnikov described the sad to sentimental arrangements of Bach, Gluck, Ravel and Japanese compositions that he played live on the edge of the catwalk until the last part of the show that was accompanied by a recording of Leonard Cohen’s Yamamoto samples You want it darker. “Reviled, crucified, in the human body / A million candles burning for the help that never came…”
Where did Yohji Yamamoto take us this season? Apparently not shaking off this mortal coil. He attributed these “broken outfits” to a more naive source. “Kids, they made it!” he said, smiling and above all cheerful. So the intention was playful? “Playful maybe, but it was very difficult to play.”
And this was certainly something other than child’s play. Not only did the looks burst with various foiled, felted and floating textures, they also didn’t adhere to conventional notions of construction. Yet the models nestled their hands in the cut-out pieces and were unencumbered by the winding cords and elongated volumes (redesigned crinolines, similar to those at Loewe earlier today, channeled the past as the future envisioned it). One statement dress in white lace with a dark gauzy pinstripe stretching from a portrait collar to a long train was absolutely grown-up and gorgeous.
We now know that contradictory impulses and expressions are inherent in Yamamoto’s oeuvre. This is how monochromatic, blobby shapes loosely plastered onto a dress can somehow seem refined, or how swirls of denim and jacquard looked opulent and arte povera at the same time. Interestingly enough, the wide variety of fabrics made me think they came from years and years of previous collections. Yamamoto’s answer: “Very good and bad question. We made them.”
At this point in his career and his life, and with a new book (in collaboration with M/M Paris) debuting Sunday, Yamamoto is still finding ways to challenge himself. It was Picasso who famously said: ‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to draw like a child.’ The beauty of this collection was that complexity and intuition emerged in equal measure.
A series of loosely constructed looks in a catchy red color brought the show to a somewhat blunt end, almost like an unspoken statement. For architect Jean Nouvel, the collection evoked the kind of beauty that was ‘at once sober and styled’. The interpretation of a Yamamoto show can always remain in the realm of the subjective. But the admiration – based on the overwhelming applause when the designer took an extended bow with Kolesnikov – well, it is collective.