Yohji Yamamoto FW23 Women’s

Tonight’s Yohji Yamamoto show opened with the designer himself singing Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” on the soundtrack. The singer once said that the song was an answer of sorts to the perennial question, “what does a woman want?” Cohen was on the side of flexibility: “If you want a lover /I’ll do anything you ask me to / And if you want another kind of love / I’ll wear a mask for you.” Forty-odd years into his career, Yamamoto takes a more resolute approach to his output.

This collection told a new version of a familiar story. Yamamoto works almost exclusively in the color black, though he did use red and white as accents this season. At a moment when fashion is coming back around to deconstruction, no one does it with more conviction than he does. Bias-cut shirt dresses were fixed with sculpted pieces of leather, and skirts unpeeled into twisting masses of raw-edged flaps, while necklaces appeared to be made from pocket-sized swatches of scrap fabric strung from leather cord—now that’s how to reduce and reuse excess materials. And he’s still chasing imperfect beauty, what with the spots painted onto models’ faces, their mussed hair, and the clothes’ asymmetries and odd layers, though the final looks, trimmed with lozenges of beads, did have an appealing simplicity.

The backs of several of the jackets were canvases for painterly silk screens. More interesting was the embroidery on a zip-front shirt that starred Yamamoto, his trademark hat in place and in his hands on his treasured guitar. The final song on the soundtrack was in Japanese. A friendly colleague offered this loose translation: “It’s a mixed feeling song—a story about a man getting old and he’s sad about it, but at the same time he’s content and happy with what he’s achieved.” A bittersweet melody.

by: Nicole Phelps for Vogue

Produced by Yohji Yamamoto team
Lighting by Lightlab
Hair by Eugene Souleiman
Make-up by Ana Takahashi
Music by Jiro Amimoto

www.yohjiyamamoto.co.jp
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