Review of Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2023 Fashion Show
Yohji’s Our Man
By Mark Wittmer
Yohji Yamamoto’s runway shows are always very emotional affairs. This poignancy of course is mainly due to his outstanding design work – which we’ll get to – but the choice of music plays a significant role as well. Fall 2023 opened with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s timeless and forlorn love tune “I’m Your Man,” sung by none other than Yohji himself – in addition to being an avid fan, he’s a musician in his own right.
Like the music that resonates with him and which he picks to score his shows, the beauty of Yohji Yamamoto’s clothes is layered, spare, and elusive. It favors the organic and honest and rejects the pristine and showily technical.
In typical fashion, the collection again affirms the designer’s lauded mastery of draping, deconstruction, and the use (and non-use) of black. But it also reveals a perhaps more intimate, introspective, and vulnerable side. Gorgeously draped coats and dresses reveal raw hems, while their seams swell into blossoms of fabric like an unexpected harmony or musical bridge.
As is to be expected, the collection is dominated by black, which makes the moments of deep dark blue and bright scarlet feel even more poetic.
A pair of reconfigured coats that seem to have had a trench as they starting point have their elongated belts that dance, twist, and ribbon around the body, a look that signals a stunning moment of bright red – which is even more impactful among Yamamoto’s typical use of black.
The majority of the collection is richly layered and complex, embodying Yohji’s impressive balance of the avant-garde and the timelessly informed. But the final dresses pare things back to their utmost simplicity – a feeling that is pushed by their being “styled” with bare feet – evincing a stunning sense of flow and moving with the body in a way that is effortless yet nonetheless points to a mastery of construction.
In much of Yohji’s work, and in this collection especially, their is a somberness and sadness, but not despair. An artist who can stage a show like this must have a deep understanding that, while life is dark – and because it is often dark – it is full of beauty, and thus full of meaning and hope.
The way this creativity seems to simply flow out of Yohji Yamamoto belies the painstaking mastery of craft and construction behind his work.
We should count ourselves truly lucky to have the ears to hear his song.