Yohji Yamamoto. Fall 2022 Menswear – Tokyo, Japan

 (Images: Yohji Yamamoto 2022)

Yohji Yamamoto after forty years of runway showings, has, like most fashion designers, being affected by the global pandemic, with its on and off again fashion weeks since the 2021 openings, once again is at the mercy of restrictions which have been implemented across Europe in lieu of the this new viral outbreak. Thus, Yamamoto has held his Fall 2022 collection at his labels’ flagship store in the suburb of Aoyama, in Tokyo, maintaining the recurring theme since is Fall 2021 showing of the furlong and worn look of an aging master, with models hair streaked gray, with a deliberate effort to remove some of their youthful glow. This is Yamamoto playing around with his own aging stature, in a paradoxical and not so subtle reflection of schooling the youth of what it is to age and become older, he turned 78 in October 2021.  

Is it all about aging? In some ways it is, the pandemic has slammed into the older generation in a brutal and unforgiving way, when, in some cases the viral contagion only mildly affected younger people it was the aging citizens and the immune compromised that were devastated by this horrible disease. Sans, the spreaders of misinformation downplaying the severity, this pandemic has been a scourge which has killed so many. The aging process humbles us, knowing that nature is the ultimate power, to which we may offer a rebellion against in our effort to survive its ferocity – but, in the end we accept that the process of birth and death is inevitable. This could be Yamamoto’s retrospection of the four decade old fashion designer who, in his stalwart manner, has been able to define not only Couture but also the avant-garde as distinctly an imprint of Yamamoto’s influence on the fashion industry.  

For Yamamoto’s Fall 2020 collection, he has crafted a more stately impression to the styles on show, incorporating the rake, rebel and iconoclastic thinker. The mature male unperturbed by the immaturity man-child as an idiom of the asinine culture wars, he is his own man, sitting at the bar alone, drinking whiskey and not giving a fuck about societal trivialities. There is a power in aging and maybe Yamamoto has begun to tap that powerful energy of maturity that, in the final years of a human life cycle, can become the most radiant. He is the anti-hero, a rough diamond, within the vortex of chaos.

Re-cut fine wool trench coats and blazers, layered with linen shirts, Yamamoto has allowed a heightened dignity emanate from his latest collection. With the conservative stylizations broken down into a reflection of a society that is becoming more dystopian, pinstripes and suiting styles are indeed a timeless style, yet they belong to the spectrum of masculinity with its yearning desire for prestige. Yamamoto has, like many of his showings, reworked this feigned and impermeant idealism of male aesthetics as his own individual counter culture. To which there are Zdzisław Beksiński, the late Polish dystopic surrealist painter, prints on shirts and jackets, thus further allowing Yamamoto’s Fall collection to transform itself into the darker elements of humanity, without the fear.

I conclude with this poem by Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶) d1827:

“In this world of ours,
We walk above hell,
Gazing at flowers“

私たちの世界では、
私たちは地獄を歩きます、
花を見つめる

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