A Brief History of YOHJI YAMAMOTO ~ World Fashion Sites

Yohji Yamamoto is widely regarded as ranking among the greatest fashion designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is one of the few in his profession who have successfully broken the boundaries between commodity and art.

Yamamoto was born in Tokyo on 3 October 1943. He never knew his father, who died in Manchuria during World War II; he was reared by his widowed mother Yumi.

A dressmaker by trade, Yumi suffered what Yamamoto recalls as the indignities of a highly skilled worker whose gender and station in life afforded her little opportunity to make a rewarding living or to obtain recognition for her talents. Yumi encouraged her son to become an attorney-he graduated with a law degree from Keio University but never practiced. The lure of becoming a designer, however, pulled Yamamoto into fashion.

After graduating from the prestigious University of Keio and Bunka Fashion College, he launched his eponymous label in 1972 in Tokyo.

The brand's women's ready-to-wear line, baptized Y's, was shown for the first time in 1977 at Tokyo Fashion Week, followed by the men's line two years later in 1979.

Along with his compatriot Rei Kawakubo, he designed his first high-end women's ready-to-wear collection in 1981 and presented it in Paris. Over the next two years, Kawakubo and Yamamoto pioneered the idea of deconstructed fashions. Their revolutionary aesthetic shocked the world with clothing that appeared to be unfinished, tattered, and haphazardly put together.

The following year, Yohji Yamamoto presented his first collection, a women's luxury ready-to-wear line named after his initials, Y's followed by Y's for Men.

In 1984, Yohji Yamamoto Menswear, a ready-to-wear collection for men, was unveiled.

Throughout the 1990s, the designer collaborated on many creative projects, creating costumes for Madame Butterfly at the Opéra de Lyons, as well as those for Tristan et Isolde in Bayreuth in 1993 and those for Life by Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999. He also designed the costumes for Takeshi Kitano's movies.

In 1996, the designer launched his first perfume, Yohji.

The designer's daughter, Limi Yamamoto, signed in 1999 a ready-to-wear collection under her father's label. She called the collection Y's Bis Limi, and then re-launched in 2002 under the name Limi Feu.

Meanwhile, in partnership with Adidas, Yohji Yamamoto created Y-3 in which visionary couture and sportswear are fused into one.

In 2007, Yohji Yamamoto teamed up with Mandarina Duck for Y's Mandarina, a collection of hybrid designs in luggage and handbags.

Yamamoto's work has also become familiar to consumers through his collaborations with other fashion brands, including Hermès and Mikimoto; and with artists of different genres, such as Tina Turner, Sir Elton John, Placebo, Takeshi Kitano, Pina Bausch and Heiner Müller.

Yamamoto’s Aesthetic:

· Gender Ambiguity: He expressed an aversion to overtly sexualized females, and often dressed women in designs inspired by men's wear. Such cross-gender role-playing has long been a part of Japanese culture, and a persistent theme among performers and artists for centuries. The fact that Yamamoto on more than one occasion chose women as models for his menswear fashion shows was another small piece of his sexual identity puzzle.

· Basic Black: No color in the fashion palette has been as important in the work of Yohji Yamamoto as black. This early unrelenting black-on-black aesthetic earned his devotees the nickname karasuzoku, or members of the crow tribe.

· Deconstructed Styles: Aesthetically, the dressmaking techniques that gave Yamamoto's work its deconstructed look were also related to traditional non-Western methods of clothing construction as well as to the concept that natural, organic, and imperfect objects can also be beautiful. Yamamoto's clothes masked the body with voluminous folds and layers of dark fabric; in addition, they diminished such evident elements of clothing as frontality and clear demarcations between the inside and outside of a garment.