Japanese designers shape a fashion revolution in the West
If there are, say, ten great fashion designers in the world right now, then at least three of them are Japanese. These are not international celebrity couturiers, doing cunning variations on conventional forms. These are revolutionaries, insurgents whose aim is to modify, sometimes even change, the shape and form of clothing itself.
Yohji Yamamoto. Rei Kawakubo. Issey Miyake.
They are widely, wildly respected among the feudal states of fashion, and are beginning to be recognized in the big world outside. Even for people who may have trouble pronouncing the names on the labels in a boutique, there is a growing perception of the changes these designers are trying to make. Fabric sewed and folded into shapes that shift on the body like shadows. Colors that seem to come from the shaded, sun-dried underside of the spectrum. Clothes that reshape the body with the undulations of their fabric. Garments in which the space between the body and the cloth sets up a sliding, changing movement that is like an ever mutable silhouette. Fashion is meant to be a frivolous business, but consider: in no other area of culture and commerce has Asian style had such a direct impact on the West. The Japanese designers are playing by their own rules.
This may seem like heavy freight for mere fashion to bear, but Japanese designers do not usually make the fussy Western distinction between craft and art. Issey Miyake talks about the "energy" of fabric and works with a bolt of cloth like a sculptor with clay, not molding it into a presketched design but draping the whole length over a body, drawing the shape of the final garment from the fabric itself as it works in easy collaboration with the body. Rei Kawakubo, the most austere and cerebral of these new designers, speaks intensely about "getting down to the essence of shapelessness, formlessness and colorlessness." At first glance, her men's and women's clothes for Comme des Garçons (the name means "like the boys" and was chosen by Kawakubo for both its lilt and its casual defiance of traditional gender stereotypes) resemble items from a thrift shop at the far corner of Macbeth's blasted heath. Nonetheless, they have an ease that confounds traditional expectations of elegance.
Yohji Yamamoto, whose wondrously simple cascades of fabric combine Kawakubo's seriousness and Miyake's ebullience, may say that "fashion is fashion. In the end I think that fashion should not be an art." But he also expects his clothes to have the social impact of some major masterwork. "If you want to wear these," he says, "then you must change your situation!"