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Yamamoto, 39, spent a little time in Paris during the late 1960s, absorbing European influences and watching the growing impact of his countryman Kenzo Takada, 43, on the insular enclave of French fashion. The whimsically heretical Kenzo and the silkenly elegant haute couturière Hanae Mori, 57, were the first Japanese designers to have any visibility or impact outside their own country, and both had to leave home and establish bases of operation in Paris or New York City to do it. Japanese fashion was not a force then. It was really more like a curiosity, and Yamamoto returned to Tokyo to spend the next three years with his mother, a dressmaker, turning out "very formfitting, terrible clothes for women whose money came from their husbands or boyfriends." At about this same time, Kawakubo, 40, a former advertising coordinator and stylist, was working out her own first fashion forays, which were almost painfully conventional reworkings of European-style peasant dresses and glitzy knits.
It was Miyake, also around this period, who was making the greatest strides forward. Now 45, Miyake had served apprenticeships with Givenchy and Laroche in Paris and with Geoffrey Beene in New York. He had watched students storm through the streets of Paris in 1968 and seen their American contemporaries staging what Miyake calls "the jeans revolution." "I was always thinking," he says, "of how I could be original, and changing the length of dresses was not enough. I respect European tradition, but the Europeans do it better."
Returning to Tokyo in 1970, he set up his own company. His first fashion collection the following year was rooted in the transmogrified past. He used sashiko, an ancient form of quilted material traditionally meant for workers' clothing and judo uniforms. Miyake wove it wide, not narrow, and softened it so it yielded an unexpected, even sensuous, pliability.
"It was my denim," he says. In those early years, the shapes had their traditional roots as well. Miyake made a housecoat, called a tanzen, into a hooded wool coat and turned striped cloth used to lead horses on ceremonial occasions into a jersey. He made tucked cotton jumpsuits so intricate that he evoked origami, the ancient art of paper folding, and he turned a farmer's backpack into a knit jacket. Says he: "I was trying to peel away to the limit of fashion."
Every designer has to go through that same peeling process. Yamamoto and Kawakubo are in a sense just finishing up for themselves what Miyake passed through a few years before. Calling Miyake simply a forerunner is an almost careless understatement, like calling
Johnny Appleseed a dirt farmer. Miyake not only led the way but showed the direction as well. Today his direction remains bold and his technique consistent. "It is important for me not to take out the best part of the fabric by cutting a piece out of the middle, as a European would do." Instead of using old fabric, he has, for some time now, been making his own. Currently, he is working with a heavily textured stretch knit that looks like a lava flow, and is trying to decide what to do with an exotic combination of linen backed with Shetland wool that he has aptly dubbed "the I don't know" fabric.