Yohji Yamamoto. Spring 2021 RTW - Paris

(Images: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com.  All credit)

It is interesting that Yohji Yamamoto declined to not hold a fashion show in Paris, apart from the fact there were travel restrictions and most designers were digitally hosting their presentations this year from afar, from all reports Yamamoto was allowed to have a larger crowd, which was staged at the Hôtel de Ville main hall as a traditional runway. Apart from the inundation of attendees, sans the models, wearing masks, of the many years that he has exhibited, Yamamoto's latest collection maybe not so deliberately paradoxical.  There is a curiosity on why the master designer, who was able to fly out of Japan to visit Paris, that is amidst a severe second wave of the COVID-19 virus, all the while the Japanese populous is recovering somewhat from the first wave that started earlier in the year.  A reckless endeavor? He just turned 77, which after almost forty years of being a renown fashion designer, visiting Paris amid the turmoil of a changing world - in my opinion, holds a fatalistic cue.  Maybe unique to the master designer's psychology, but more or less, as a spectator there lies an uneasiness in orchestrating such a grand runway show.

Of course the big news of late is that President Trump who is 74, on numerous occasions played down the viral outbreak, has been hospitalized with the virus.  It is the desperation of a society not knowing how to begin again, will be further thrown into doubt when leaders and icons are sickened by the virus.  For what ever one feels about the President, the virus is merciless, it doesn't care about human prestige, power or economics, nor is it programmed too.  It is a entity that infects cells and may end up killing the host.  When most designers, decided to pull back and rethink collections and how the present them, the morbidity or doomish aspirations of the aging designer can be called in question.  When asked why he would fly from Japan to Paris within the pandemic, he replied that “people thought I was crazy” .  Is this Yamamoto's discriminative stimulus? His motivation?  

There is a doomsday ethos to Yamamoto's latest array, although since starting his signature name in Paris 40 years ago, he has very much become a fixture of the Gothic avant-garde styles, that other designers followed much later on.  All owe in an aesthetic context, the influence that Yamamoto portrayed with his mastery of the achromatic.  With its draped and shadowy stylizations, utilizing darkness as a fashionable imprint.  But, Yamamoto held more of a poetic expression of his fascination with the Stygian, that always had a personal cue, rather than its trend orientations, which he has developed over the many years.  Yamamoto offers both the blunt and subtle in its potency of black, to which an avant-garde style represents, at the end of the day; death.

There is a symbolism with Yamamoto's Spring 2021 collection, a morbidity, but also a selfishness. An indulgence, as models slowly walk the runway, maskless, turning away from each other.  Social distancing unheard of, with a magnitude of risks attached.  It seems sacrificial.  The collection in a overt mannerism is akin to cultist frustration, a resentment towards a society that, although one tries to normalizes ones self in, in the end is perturbed that it may not transpire as an accomplishment.  That life is short and fame is fleeting.  That master, should know when to retract when his or her thoughts become clouded.  As others may follow their confusion.