On the eve of the Spring Summer 2012 mens shows in Paris, we present an interview with one of the greats on the calendar, the legendary Yohji Yamamoto. In discussion with A BLOG contributor Filep Motwary, Yohji muses on his new book ‘My Dear Bomb’, his exhibitions in London, and the qualities of a ‘Yohji’ man.
Filep Motwary: What made you decide to share the most intimate parts of your life and career with the world?
Yohji Yamamoto: It is not literally a biography. It is a mix of novel, documentary, essay, confession and lying. It’s more about direct emotion than historical information. A Belgian publisher, Ludion, contacted us to make a book. But it was also a coincidence. I was looking for something. After the terrible events last year, which also touched my company, I became stronger and I thought that I could do much more than fashion. To create clothes, I need emotion.
FM: You don’t see this book as an epilogue, I’m sure.
YY: It is the beginning of a new chapter. I hate the retrospective attitude. I am always standing here and now. It all came together very spontaneously. We had casual conversations, four or five times, sometimes a short one over a cup of coffee, sometime a long one for over eight hours. I spoke and she wrote.I decided to write with a co-author because I don’t have the time to write myself. Writing requires a great deal of time and concentration. Also, I cannot often find the words that express my true feelings;I only find it in someone else’s words that are inspiring or that share the same vocabulary. The Japanese writer Ango Sakaguchi, and his essays A Discourse on Decadence (Zoku darakuron) and A Personal View of Japanese Culture (Nihon bunka shikan), is one.
FM: You called your book ‘My Dear Bomb’. Why?
YY: My feelings are always ambivalent – towards life, time and women. Fundamentally, it is my way of being. I have had a constant magma inside me for a long time. I was the only son of a war widow. The fundamental inequality… the bomb can signify many things, depending on the moment. Sometimes anger, sometimes resignation, sometimes resentment…
FM: So has looking back to your past been an emotional experience?
YY: I hate looking back. That is why most of this book is not about the past, but about now.
FM: For me, your work is about the embrace of the human body, but not in a body-conscious way. How would you describe your clothes?
YY: Your question already answers itself. If I have to say something about my work, it is that I have always been provocative and anti-mode. I prefer being out of fashion, away from trends.
FM: The V&A is presenting a major exhibition of your work. What does the exhibition do for a visitor?
YY:I really don’t know. I hope that young people, and not only art-school students, are going to visit it.
FM: What will they see?
YY: They will find that I am a genius.
FM: What is the process of developing a collection like for you?
YY: The only thing I do differently from other designers of today is that I’m always thinking that after I show my collection, I want to sell it too. So it’s not only promotion.
FM: Your shows are so intimate, but in the past, the way you presented your clothes was a bit more theatrical. Why?
YY: In the past, I was always following a feeling that was against fashion or trend. Clearly, I was always against common sense. My tendency is always against, against, against.
FM: Do you feel menswear is going through an interesting period?
YY: Do you think so? For me, it looks like the menswear market is down and flat. My men’s line has always been for men who do not wear a tie – businessmen.
FM: Is the Yohji man connected with the martial arts, like you are with karate?
YY: Imagine you are a 70-year-old man and you get a threat from a young man at the corner of the metro station. Are you going to give him your wallet? Men should be men forever.
FM: What do you admire in a man?
YY: I love men who keep a child’s mind no matter how old they are.
FM: Are you a dreamer?
YY: I am a natural-born optimist.
FM: What is your greatest achievement so far?
YY: The changes in the fashion industry, I feel that they’re my fault. I cannot change the world. I’ve been a little lazy… I should have known a little more about the market. It’s like a film director getting old; he cannot see his audience any more. All I can do is keep sending the same message: I’m here, I don’t want to go downmarket. I am an animal making clothes. My body reacts when I see the clothes.
FM: Mr Yamamoto,you have served fashion for four decades. How do you see it evolving in the future?
YY: Selecting one outfit means seducing your life. Looking at the fashion market over that time, it looks so flat.
FM: What have been the most defining – and difficult – moments of your career?
YY: When I was nearly 50 years old, after almost10 years in Paris, people started calling me a “master”. At that moment, I was like a lost child. That was a very tough moment.
FM: Why has your label become so successful?
YY: I do not push my customers to be perfectly fashionable. This is very important. The success of fashion comes from both creator and customer.
FM: What inspired your men’s collection for summer 2011?
YY: One of the inspirations came from traditional European textiles. Wallpaper, decoration and embroidery… and 18th-century menswear’s gloriously dressy past. I find current fashion is too American. It’s T-shirts and shorts all the time. I think we need some proper elegance to enhance the atmosphere a bit.
FM: What other forms of creation interest you?
YY: Painting. I had some training as a painter when I was young. Painting has two meanings. One: no deadline, and two: I can do it by myself, no need for anyone else. Finally, I can take all the responsibility. For a fashion business, what we call a “company” is very far from that, and I don’t want to be a slave to la mode. The rhythm of the fashion schedule is a jail.
FM: Who are your favorite artists?
YY: Wim Wenders, Bob Dylan, Pina Bausch, August Sander, Man Ray, Bartabas, Takeshi Kitano, Ango Sakaguchi, Heiner Müller, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Klimt.
FM: How can art be linked to fashion in your opinion?
YY: As I say in my book: “Fashion among all the arts expresses the most delicate elements of sensibility. I have no stomach for fads like the art complex that was recently so popular. Museums are even worse. No designer really wants his clothes displayed in one. They are where fashion goes to die. It is the same with retrospectives – I will have no part of them, either.”
FM: You once said, “If you are not waking up what’s asleep, you might as well stay on the beaten path.”
YY: “To achieve anti-fashion through fashion”: this is the core of my creative attitude. In the late 1990s, when I had a lot of offers to be the designer at haute couture maisons, frankly, I had no interest in it. To say it again, I was the only son of a war widow. This fundamental inequality is the universal law. I also write about this in my book:
“A persimmon tree bears persimmons. Not all among them will grow and ripen. Some are damned, existing only to nourish the blessed, chosen persimmons. Such is the universal rhythm that controls us all, each and every thing in the universe.” And I always feel sympathy with the outsiders.
Again from my book: “To rebel against the world’s various authorities, systems and regimes is to assume consistently the position of a minority. Somewhere along the line my sympathies were drawn to these minorities, those people on the side of resistance. These marginalised individuals did not choose the conditions into which they were born; they live trapped in the most basic human inequities and they face injustices that cannot be rationalised. When we forget that these conditions exist, we will be unable to touch people’s souls in our attempts to create the novel and unique. People will remain unmoved.”
source: A MAGAZINE