A Man in Full
Review of Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2025 Men’s Fashion Show
By Mark Wittmer
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Voluminous. Layered. Moody. Modular.
We know that no tailoring technique is safe from Yohji Yamamoto’s avant-garde eye, but his latest menswear collection moves further beyond his mastery of the classics to incorporate a more recent, perhaps even trendy, sartorial development: the puffer jacket.
It’s not like technical fabrics and function-forward outerwear is anything new to Yohji – he is, of course, the mastermind behind Y-3, the OG high fashion and sportswear collaboration – but the way he incorporated them so seamlessly into his oeuvre does feel at once fresh and timeless. Classic men’s tailoring and carefully researched militaria is reimagined with quilting and down fill. Even timeless materials like linen get the puffer treatment, while antique-inspired pieces are in turn reimagined with innovative technical fabrics.
As if to emphasize those principles of modularity, flexibility, and creative exchange, several of the models actually traded coats and jackets on the runway, revealing not only that these pieces can be styled a number of ways, but that they are also reversible.
Aside from the thorough and unexpected use of these puffer and quilting techniques, this was a classic Yohji collection – that is, plenty of subtly inventive details, moody prints drawn in part from the phantasmagorical lithographs of Odilon Redon (who, like Yohji, produced the majority of his works in monochrome), silhouettes that used European tailoring to achieve a Japanese perspective on volume, and styling choices that follow an artful intuition more than any readily apparent logic.
THE DIRECTION
THE WRAP UP
Yohji Yamamoto may be famously uninterested in responding to fashion industry trends (and that’s part of what makes him so great), but there was one more sign from today’s show that he’s still very much paying attention – the presence of Italian pop star and style icon Mahmood walking the runway. How this unexpected guest appearance came about will have to remain another story for now, but based on some of Mahmood’s Instagram fit pics, it’s clear he’s a fan of the designer.
And who wouldn’t be? For as consistent and true to himself as Yohji always is, a single runway look from him contains a world of freshly imagined design narrative. That’s worth getting puffed up about.
