In a rare interview, Yohji Yamamoto speaks to BoF’s Imran Amed about the fashion philosophy that underpins his revolutionary career.
The iconic, prolific, and notoriously press-shy Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto speaks with BOF founder, Imran Amed his design and brand philosophy. Yamamoto is conic for his bleeding-edge sculptural shapes, tailoring, stark, minimal, even absent play of colour. Yamamoto suggests “simply very lucky.” But we know different, he is a force. He offers profound advice for up and comers, “Young people are not yet really having individuality or strong power. So I tell them, you can copy somebody who you like very much. Copy it and copy it until at the end of the copy you have found yourself.”
BOF | PARIS, France — Yohji Yamamoto first emerged on the fashion scene in 1981, when he brought his revolutionary design sensibility to Paris from Tokyo, setting off what would become an aesthetic earthquake. Since then, the designer has become renowned for his avant-garde tailoring, featuring over-sized silhouettes and a restricted, dark palette.
The only son of a war widow, Yamamoto was born in Japan during the Second World War and grew up without any memories of his father, whom he lost when he was only one year old. He was raised singlehandedly by his mother and spent his childhood and early university career studying diligently to please her.
Yamamoto’s mother was a dressmaker who had a shop in in Kabukicho, an amusement and entertainment district in Tokyo’s Shinjuku. It was there that he came to work after graduating from the prestigious Keio University in Tokyo, a decision that initially angered his mother.
But Yamamoto had realised, “I didn’t want to join the ordinary society,” he says. “So I told my mother after graduation…I want to help you.”
Eventually, Yamamoto’s mother agreed to let him work at her shop, saying he could learn from the sewing assistants. At her request, he also enrolled at Bunka Fashion College, now famous for training designers including Kenzo Takada,Junya Watanabe and Yamamoto himself. At the time, however, “the Bunka dressmaking school was sort of for younger girls,” Yamamoto confesses. “It was like classes for preparation for getting married, flower arrangement, cooking and dressmaking.”
When he arrived at the school, Yamamoto says, he didn’t even know that the profession of fashion design existed. “I just wanted to study making clothes, cutting and sewing.”
The early days of Yamamoto’s career were not easy. After graduating from Bunka, he received a prize to go to Paris for a year. When the designer arrived in Paris, he found the era of haute couture — what he had studied — drawing to a close. “Saint Laurent had just started ready-to-wear,” he remembers. “The haute couture time was going to finish and a new movement of ready-to-wear had started.”
After repeatedly failing to persuade magazines to feature his designs, Yamamoto grew dejected, stopping drawing and taking up drinking and gambling instead. “I thought, ‘I have no talent,’” he says. Eventually, he says he realised he needed to leave before he destroyed himself, so he returned to Tokyo.
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