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Other directions, for all three designers, seem a little clearer. Kawakubo, who insists that "a jacket does not necessarily always have to have a back, any more than it has to have a shoulder line," will continue with her canny experimentation in regimented shapelessness, this year cutting and knotting her loose silhouettes into closer conformation with the wearer. Yamamoto will continue his excursions along the friendly edge of the outer limits. "A piece of paper has a surface and a back," he likes to say. "Other designers are doing the surface, and I am doing the back." Miyake is taking a direction that many Westerners will understand: a somewhat stricter shaping, although always within loose-limbed limits. "I had to do something different," he says. "I have been getting closer to the body."
The attention and attendant excitement around these three designers has buoyed the whole field of Japanese fashion. It may just be a trick of the limelight, but there seems to be bright talent everywhere. The gifted Mitsuhiro Matsuda, 49, makes clothes for his company, Nicole, that feature a kaleidoscopic collision of American influences: Annie Hall meets Mean Streets. Two of his contemporaries, Hiroko Koshino, 46, and Yukiko Hanai, 45, are showing a more European, high-fashion look. Younger designers like Shin Hosokawa, 33 (owner-designer of Pashu), and Yumiko Tamura, 28, and Tokio Kumagai, 35 (two of the major designers for Jun), are also showing keen interest and flair in appealing to the young, unmarried Japanese who still live at home with parents and whose salary checks do not yet have to support a family.
While the aesthetic influence of Yamamoto, Miyake and Kawakubo may be out of proportion to their earnings, there is still little reason to fret about their corporate coffers. Miyake's business now grosses $20 million a year; Yamamoto's newer company already grosses more than that; and Comme des Garçons, with sales growing at an average of 20% a year, is preparing to open its first American boutique in New York's fast and flashy SoHo district.
If Japanese fashion requires—indeed, demands—a kind of cerebral re-evaluation in prospect, in practice it does exactly what its designers preach. The clothes are easy to wear, eccentric only at their most extreme and flattering because they seem to relax around the wearer, not enveloping, containing or constraining the body, but rather exalting its freedom. At its best and at its essence, Japanese fashion not only holds on to the romance of the Asian past but extends a small promise of a shared future. —By Jay Cocks. Reported by Sandra Burton/Tokyo