Spotlight on Yohji

By dressing his models in low heels, Yohji Yamamoto says he gives them "a different way of walking, feeling and of presenting themselves". Picture / Reuters

It's been almost a quarter of a century since Yohji Yamamoto's Paris debut. That was in 1981 and the army of grim-faced models that marched down the runway - hair shorn, faces painted white - was to change the face of fashion.

In place of the requisite uplifting show soundtrack came an amplified, electronic heartbeat. Instead of the standard hourglass silhouette, the designer produced asymmetric shapes in distressed fabrics, peppered with holes. And though rainbow colour was at that point de rigueur, Yamamoto's clothes were resolutely dark, mainly black. And the models' shoes were flat.

The world's most beautiful women were forced to re-learn their walks to accommodate the brilliant young Japanese designer's view of femininity. "By dressing women in low heels," he said much later, "I give them a different way of walking, feeling and of presenting themselves."

"Yohji is one of the most important fashion designers working today," says Olivier Saillard, curator of Yohji Yamamoto - Juste des Vetements, at the Musee de la Mode et du Textile des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

"Since the 80s he has deconstructed fashion and given a new model of beauty, of clothes that are more modern and without reference to the past."

Yamamoto's own view is typically modest. "I've never asked myself whether fashion is art or not," he says. "That's why the exhibition is called Juste des Vetements."

There are those who might argue, however, that his designs elevate fashion quite some way beyond mere clothing.

"Yohji's clothes are the most complex and beautiful, they are like architecture," Saillard says. Everyone from the International Herald Tribune's famed fashion critic Suzy Menkes to the legendary buyer Joseph Ettedgui is quick to describe Yamamoto as "a poet".

The facts of his life only add to this effect. He was born in Tokyo in 1943. His mother was a seamstress, and his father was drafted and killed in the World War II.

"He went against his will," Yamamoto said in the 1989 film Notebooks On Cities And Clothes, directed by his friend Wim Wenders.

"When I think of my father, I realise that the war is still raging inside me."

After he completed a law degree at Keio University, Yamamoto turned to fashion, working first with his mother and graduating from the Bunkafukuso Gakuin school in Tokyo in 1969. Three years later he launched Y's, a collection inspired by the utilitarian wardrobe worn by Japanese workers of that period.

He has said that his extraordinary view of femininity and tendency to envelop the body rather than expose it in the manner of most Western designers is a result of his experience of his mother: the focus is regularly on the backs of garments.

"In the very beginning of my life, I knew only my mother," he says. "She was a war widow, working very hard. So I was always looking at her back. I had double emotions about it. First, I had to help her, try to make her life easier. But also, she was always leaving and I was always running after her. So, my ideal woman is always moving away from me. And I am saying 'don't go, don't go'."

The fronts of women, he has said, are "too strong. Where I was born, there were very many prostitutes. And they were wearing high heels and strong lipstick. And really, I was afraid. Because they looked very wild and scary. Not natural.

"Somewhere in the things humans make I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion. Perfection is a kind of order, like overall harmony and so on ... They are things someone forces on to a thing. A free human being does not desire such things."

Juste des Vetements is staged over two floors, the first of which re-creates the designer's Tokyo studio, aiming to show the stages a garment goes through from sketch to toile to final finished prototype. On the second floor are 80 garments that represent Yamamoto's development.

Despite the designer's radical stance it is interesting to see how often he references classic European clothing, from Christian Dior's New Look to Coco Chanel's striped T-shirt and sailor pants. The signatures of Vionnet, Gres and Balenciaga are also ripe for reinvention.

"Yohji Yamamoto's work has always juxtaposed traditional Japanese costume with the elegance of la couture Francaise," says Saillard.

In Talking To Myself, an "illustrated notebook" published in 2002, Kiyokazu Washida, professor of the faculty of literature at the graduate school of Osaka University, points out that Yamamoto often describes his clothes as "shabby".

"What he means by that," Washida elaborates, "is that they do not allow association with any of society's particular stereotypes."

Yamamoto's clothes are worn by "the salaried employee or the artist, the journalist or the student, the elderly or the young, they are difficult to match with any concrete image when seen at a glance. Rather, in defiance of any such identification, they are in a sense peculiarly abstract."

Which only adds to Yamamoto's appeal - he openly flouts notions of wealth and power while, paradoxically, positioning himself at the highest end of designer clothing. He remains, although part of fashion, still slightly outside it.

Ask Yohji Yamamoto whether he feels honoured by the retrospective and he claims always to have been suspicious of the word. Even he has to admit, however: "I always hoped I could leave something out there for people in the future."

- INDEPENDENT