You Want It Darker
Review of Yohji Yamamoto Spring 2025 Fashion Show
By Mark Wittmer
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Intricate. Voluminous. Reflective. Somber. Vital.
Yohji Yamamoto is a true master of variation in the musical sense of the word. Spring 2025 sees the maestro of all things avant-garde, tailored, voluminous, and black push this practice further into complex and intricate directions while tapping into a reflective, almost spiritual undercurrent.
This season, Yohji’s expansive and complexly layered silhouettes are achieved by bringing together many small parts. Material elements that would almost seem like leftover scraps if they didn’t have such a strong sense of intentionality are knotted, twisted, fused, intertwined, interlocked to create structures that are both solid and cascading. Sometimes these fabrics are the solid black the designer is known for; other times a delicate lace, a pleated sheer, a tartan, or even an unexpected metallic leather take us in a new graphic direction. Similarly, we can pick out familiar elements of dressmaking and tailoring – a lapel here, a bustle there – but these slyly deployed elements serve as much to complicate the structural narrative as they do to ground it. Each look is both an immediately striking silhouette and an almost endlessly dissectible amalgamation of details.
Accompanying the collection is an equally thoughtful soundtrack. Towards the end of the show, the solo classical variations performed by a live pianist give way to a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” sung by Yohji himself. The title track of Cohen’s final album, which was released just 17 days before his death, the song is a somber – yet not hopeless – rumination on mortality, faith, regret, and redemption. Amazingly, it’s not like the designer is showing any signs of slowing down, but he is about to turn 81, making this reflection on life and death particularly poignant – a sentiment perhaps echoed by the partial black veils worn with many of the looks.
Yet this somber and reflective musical moment also scores and is transformed by the show’s revelatory finale. After 38 looks of complexly layered dresses dominated by black, a series of solid red dresses emerge and occupy the runway together, from darkness blossoming into a potent statement of passion and vitality.
THE DIRECTION
THE WRAP UP
Yohji Yamamoto’s love affair with black is so ubiquitous that it’s a long-running semi-joke among fashion editors that there is a dress code of all black at his runway shows. But in Yohji’s hands, we never get tired of this most solemn of shades, and this runway show proved once again that there are still new ways to experience the color (or lack thereof), sometimes seeing it through new shapes, sometimes feeling its impact even more sharply through its absence. Yamamoto and Cohen are right: we do want it darker.
