6. Forging their own path - Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto

~ It’s boring if things are accomplished too easily, right? When I work I think about the excitement of achievement after hard effort and pain. ~ Rei Kawakubo 36

Forging their own path - Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto:

The ways in which the West categories and understands contemporary Japanese fashion designers and their work presents those designers with a frustrating paradox. It inspires the question: What exactly is “Japanese” about the work of Red Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto? The most important element that separates ‘Japanese’ avant-garde fashion from its Western counterpart is its reliance on cloth as a starting point for creation. Yohji Yamamoto stated :

“The biggest difference between our Japanese taste and European people’s taste is in the concept of perfection. When I traveled in Greece and Italy and saw the classical architecture, I saw things that were made in a static image of perfection. I’m not interested in that kind of perfection - I’m tired of it. When I make something that I don’t want to recreate my own mind exactly. So I always make seventy to eighty percent of what I think and then I throw it in front of the consumers to complete and say, wear it the way you like.” 37

Wabi-sabi in the West has become a catch-all parade that allows some to conveniently label the Japanese approach to aesthetics. Commonly quoted elements of wabi-sabi are: the appreciation of things that show their age, having a character of their own, objects that are imperfect although painstakingly crafted (to reach that imperfection) and impermanence.

Kawakubo remained relentlessly conceptual, and like the punks, whose style she sometimes referenced, she was unafraid to present ‘ugly’ clothes that raised big questions such as “What is beauty?” The dressmaking techniques that gave Kawakubo and Yamamoto the look they desired also finds connection to traditional non-western methods of clothing construction and a modified reinterpretation (I beg to differ, as will be explained in the next section) of the Japanese concept (wabi - sabi) that natural, organic, and imperfect objects can also be beautiful. 38

+++ 14

36 Steele, Japan Fashion Now, p. 23

37 Steele, Japan Fashion Now, p. 95