With Yohji Yamamoto watching from the front row, the partnership he originally founded with Adidas back in 2002 remained as fueled up as ever. The collection was positioned as The Uniform of the Streets, and among the main takeaways was how uniform is a byword for a wealth of wardrobe ideas. The lineup moved through stricter silhouettes, like black fitted coats, long skirts, and waist-cinching belts; crossover looks from day into night; looser layers that nodded to skateboarding and snowboarding; and several statement jackets that you could throw on over just about anything and feel an instant edge. Gradient bursts of deep red echoed a look in Yohji-san’s men’s collection a few days ago, while the graphics of longtime collaborator Chikami Hayashi were juxtaposed with art from Chito, who tagged leather with “Tokyo” and “Paris,” plus floating skulls—a vanitas via warm-up jacket.
This season marked a revival of denim at Y-3. It was unsurprisingly dark, given the brand’s natural state of black, and more fashionably ample than anything bordering on athleisure. The big reveal, though, was a collaboration with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team. In black with white piping, the jackets boasted the requisite sponsor names and signaled a good fit for Y-3 at a moment when Formula 1 has been increasingly embraced by fashion (see last year’s LV lockup). They were paired with fluid pants and either of the new shoe designs—the Y-3 Tokyo Warped or the Y-3 Superstar 3G—and what resulted was performance driving style and vice versa.
The photos here obscure the three white stripes that extended down the runway and melded with sloped staging that riffed on both a race-car track and a skate ramp. It was a clever, direct concept—props to the Paris creative studio Matière Noire—that nodded to both high-octane sports. Consistent with a wild sneaker design of wolf faces, a troupe of contemporary dancers in boilersuits with wolf masks accompanied the models, gliding across the space in unison and on their own. Perhaps they represented the street, composed of the collective and the individual. In any case, they underscored a show turned up to beast mode.
