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Here's what you need to know about Limi Yamamoto: she never wanted to become a fashion designer. Growing up rebellious in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, Limi dreamed, when she dreamed at all, of playing bass guitar in a rock band. But here she is in her wood-paneled studio in Tokyo, surrounded by outfits from her most recent collection: ruffled black skirts, well-tailored white blouses, chunky gray street shoes that read "LIMI feu" on their tongues, the name of her fashion label. Hard work helped bring her here, but in keeping with her diffident start, Limi's ambitions seem modest. She knows she needs to present in Europe to be considered a serious designer, but Japan is as far as she'll probably go, and that's all right. "I don't have the dream to go to Paris," Limi says. She adds another half-smoked cigarette to her ashtray. "I'm not trying to get the same kind of name my father did."

That would be Yohji Yamamoto, fashion's man in black, a designer no one could accuse of lacking artistic ambition. When Yohji and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons introduced their radically austere designs to Paris in 1981, they brought the shock of the new to an industry that was marinating in miniskirts, yuppie glitz and bulky shoulder pads. "It was very revolutionary," says Yumiko Hara, a Tokyo-based fashion director. "It definitely established a new kind of beauty." There were critics who rejected the early Yohji aesthetic—the experimental cutting, the stern models and the black, black, black—but the Paris newspaper Libération got its headline right: "French Fashion Has Found Its Masters: the Japanese." Yohji and Kawakubo—along with Issey Miyake, who had debuted in the 1970s—became icons of global style. "Yohji found the truth of clothes," says Françoise Moréchand-Nagataki, a French expert in Japanese fashion who knows the designers. "It was so beautiful."

But the revolution would be brief. In the years since, no new Japanese designer has managed to achieve the influence of the big three. The end of the bubble economy is partly responsible, but something in the nature of the industry in Japan has changed. In a country where the fashion sense of a stylist trumps the earned creativity of a designer, where marketing beats originality, there is little room for new creators who seek more than mere merchandise out of their designs. Tokyo may be the most fashionable place on the planet—witness the collision between the pricey boutiques of Omotesando and the do-it-yourself street looks of nearby Harajuku—yet scant interest is shown in the work of young Japanese who would sit in their studios and dream new clothes, as Yohji Yamamoto once did. No one knows that better than daughter Limi. "The 1980s are never going to happen again," she says. "In this world, it's difficult for anyone to create anything that brilliant."

STYLE RULES
"He looks like Christ," Moréchand-nagataki says, and she's right, were Christ a heavy-smoking, black-belt-holding Japanese who'd made it to the age of 61. It's the eyes she means, deep and steady, black as the outfit Yohji Yamamoto is wearing in his factory-like Tokyo studio. Lately those eyes look tired too. A pair of gilded celebrations of his long career were held this past winter in Paris and Florence, cementing Yohji's reputation as one of the 20th century's iconic designers, not that he needed any help on that score. "I hate retrospective exhibitions," he says. "They remind me of so many mistakes, so many sufferings. I feel like I am very old."

If Yohji is feeling his age, it hasn't affected his productivity—only two years ago he added another line, a sportswear collaboration with Adidas called Y3. But while Yohji and his contemporaries were driven to create, many in the younger generation seem to treat design as just another freeter job. "These days if you want to become a designer, you can become a designer like that," says stylist Tomoki Sukezane. "You design something, you become a designer. If it doesn't work, you try something else. Maybe you become a DJ." The designer as tortured, epoch-changing artist is out; the designer as trend-spinning dilettante is in. "You don't have to try so hard," says Sukezane. One of the most popular brands in Tokyo today is Samantha Thavasa, which has 77 shops throughout the country and produces pricey handbags beloved by many young Japanese women. Thavasa's big designer? Nicky Hilton, the studious one of the famous sisters. Trying hard is so 25 years ago.

If you have talent and cool in Tokyo today, you show it by opening a select shop on the back streets of the hip shopping district Harajuku, picking and choosing fashions high and low like a DJ mixing tracks. Or better yet, you become a stylist like Sukezane, coordinating outfits for celebrities, playing your pied pipe for the common consumer in Japan's instructional fashion magazines. Those who tough it out designing complain about the lack of government support, or the slavish preference of young Japanese for foreign luxury brands. But these are side effects. Japanese fashion design has lost much of the international status it enjoyed in the 1980s because young Japanese don't want to design like their elders did. They may not want to design at all. "People are saying you don't need designers anymore, that merchandising is enough," says Sanae Kosugi, who as president of Tokyo's prestigious Bunka Fashion Business School is responsible for training many of those designers. No wonder Limi wanted to play bass instead.

But the family business beckoned. When her father offered her the chance to run her own line less than three years after she joined the company in 1996, she snatched at the chance. Limi's debut in 2000 was strong if far from revolutionary, packed with well-crafted designs that mixed cute and cool. Backstage, a proud Yohji gave his daughter words of comfort and wisdom. "When she was just starting her new line, I told her, 'Welcome to hell,'" he says. "Now she is in hell."

You can't accuse Yohji of taking his trade lightly. And for all her detachment, neither does Limi. Her most recent collection is palpably adult compared with the candy-colored juvenilia of most young female fashion in Tokyo. Her dresses and jackets are long and black and finely cut, with traces of classical elegance in their casual styles. Even rich velvet makes an appearance in a red coat that is the collection's gorgeously simple centerpiece. "I wanted to tell young people they can wear velvet, they can wear something really nice," says Limi. "I wanted to make it, even if they don't buy it." She puts out another half-smoked cigarette. "I want to change their way of looking at clothes."

THE REVOLUTION ISN'T OVER
"I design for the woman who does not exist," says Yohji Yamamoto, in his dreamy voice. "The ideal woman." For Limi Yamamoto, it's always been the opposite—the women for whom she designs are very much real. They're the ones she sees on the street, walking to work, shopping, arguing with their boyfriends. They're the ones who might buy her designs—or they might buy Gucci instead. No one calls her a genius, and the only way she's going to Paris is on vacation. But she goes on working, designing against the tide of fashion, with a sincerity and a seriousness that mark her as a true designer—even if she never wished to be one. "I wanted to tell the world that I can make something like this," says Limi, gesturing at the red velvet coat. "That I can make something beautiful." She has.

• Bryan Walsh
• Limi Yamamoto wants to follow her famous father as a designer. But the Japan of his time is no more