In recent years—and as recently as last season—the men’s collections from Yohji Yamamoto have provided a platform for posting messages. Some seemed prophetic, others poetic; what mattered was how the words could be worn to communicate and were unrelated to branding or logos.
The multi-layered and multi-tonal looks of today’s line-up came and went without any writing, yet the clothes spoke volumes. The volumes were pronounced with padding along arms and down the legs, so that no matter the man’s morphology, they all projected a similar shape. But the bulkiness was counterbalanced by the polish of infantry buttons that also existed to modify the silhouettes. Elements of mechanic and military uniforms were merging into hybrids—the utility and regimental details occupying the same sartorial terrain.
Such experimentation, as with all concepts from Yamamoto, was not arbitrary. “Everything was inspired by the army and working in dirty conditions,” he said backstage, appearing particularly animated. “Army outfits and fighting outfits are very important for safety.”
Importantly, he was espousing a softer kind of protection, more enveloping than menacing, more lived-in than trounced upon. These wandering men with their extreme bedhead mops were sufficiently quilted up, or else piling on the flannels and blanket wools so they could endure long stretches outdoors. The styling toggled between eccentrically resourceful and roguishly refined—from fold-over cuffs and lacing-redefined corduroy pant legs to the sequence of unstructured black ensembles where a single cuff of a coat sleeve was set ablaze with threads of red.
Yamamoto has a singular way of reimagining existing ideas through more complex executions. His answer to armor: flattened aluminum cans fashioned into a vest or hats. His spin on camouflage: a patchwork of cut-up fabric in elaborate relief. If the prints that opened the show qualified as a kind of camo—reminiscent of subway posters peeling off to expose a colorful blur of layers—the glistening jumpsuits delivered a slick and technical rejoinder.
You might be wondering about the black punch ball—two of them, to be precise. From each model, a different interaction: one threw a jab, another bowed. One gave a bise then continued along the well-worn runway with its traces of stripped-away paint. They were placed so that an encounter was unavoidable, the briefest emotional display without uttering a word. How would Yohji-san have engaged with the inanimate object? Ever the charmer, he smiled and gestured a sensual caress. Make love, not war, in other words.
