Fashion is, at heart, a reaction. A reaction to the moment in which we live, politically, culturally, economically, and also a reaction to what has come before, to history, to the history of fashion and, sometimes, to the history of a designer's own work. From that history, Yohji Yamamoto's collaboration with Adidas, later to become Y-3, was born. The designer's aesthetic, developed in Japan in the late 1970s, originally had its roots in the country's workwear, specifically men's, also in part inspired by the robustly beautiful portraiture of the photographer August Sander. Incidentally, Sander's imagery - capturing a cross-section of society in early-20th-century Germany - finds contemporary reflection in Daido Moriyama's visions of Tokyo from the 1960s to today.
Over time Yamamoto's aesthetic became less direct, more rarefied, more visibly…
