Yohji Yamamoto doesn’t merely respond to the moment, he addresses something more enduring, less visible. His work moves through time rather than being confined by it. For several years now, his Spring/Summer menswear collections have carried a recurring message, one part warning, one part lament: the Earth is heating up, and we may need to rethink how we clothe ourselves for what’s coming. But this season, as guests filed into the show still damp from the previous night’s Parisian downpour, the message felt less like prophecy and more like plain fact.
Yamamoto offered no self-congratulatory “I told you so.” Instead, he responded as he always has, with clothes. Intellectual, strange, emotionally resonant clothes that are both personal and planetary. The Spring/Summer 2026 collection was a study in weightlessness, constructed from breathable materials and layered with symbols, visual, textual and spiritual, that together formed a lucid expression of present anxieties and eternal beauty.
The collection unfolded in movements, like a quiet sermon. It opened with deceptively simple silhouettes: short-sleeved shirts, loose trousers, relaxed tailoring. On paper, these garments read as practical; in motion, they felt jazz-inflected, offhandedly elegant. But this was only the prelude. What followed was a drift into more surreal territories, unstructured layers that nodded to both pajama dressing and post-grunge melancholy, often printed with graphics lifted from stained glass windows, Gothic tracery, and marine organisms.
There was text too, sans serif warnings and whispers about nuclear war, ocean pollution, hydrogen ions, and, in a turn of poetic defiance, the phrase: “She walks in beauty.” This particular line, borrowed from Byron, served as both contradiction and complement. It reminded the viewer that beauty and devastation are not mutually exclusive states, and may in fact be entwined more often than we admit.
As always, Yamamoto scored his own show. Between instrumental interludes with an outlaw edge, his own voice emerged in mournful renditions of “Endless Love,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, songs that, in this context, sounded less romantic than elegiac.
When Yamamoto emerged to take his bow, hat in hand, he offered a closing statement, not to the fashion world, but to the world itself. He spoke of political apathy and environmental crisis. “Otherwise,” he warned, “the Earth will end so soon.” No need for dramatics. The clothes had already said everything.
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Highlights from the Collection
