Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto’s mother was a war widow who supported herself as a dressmaker in post-war Tokyo. This biographical fact is not incidental. The specificity of his understanding of cloth — how it falls, how it resists, how it ages — begins there, in a childhood spent watching fabric move through his mother’s hands. He studied law at Keio University before returning to what he already knew, enrolling at Bunka Fashion College and launching his women’s line in 1972. A decade later, he would present in Paris alongside Rei Kawakubo and change the terms of the conversation entirely.

The Spring/Summer 1983 show remains one of the most significant debuts in the history of Paris fashion. Yamamoto sent out oversized, asymmetric garments in black — a color the French fashion establishment associated with mourning, not luxury. Models wore flat shoes. Their faces were unpainted. The Western press recoiled, but the designers who mattered understood immediately: Yamamoto was not rejecting beauty. He was locating it elsewhere, in the space between the body and the garment, in the imprecision of drape, in the philosophical weight of the color black. For Yamamoto, black is not the absence of color. It is a discipline.

His work across the decades has maintained a remarkable consistency without ever becoming predictable. The collaboration with Adidas on Y-3, launched in 2003, proved that his sensibility could extend into sportswear without dilution. His men’s collections — often the stronger work — treat tailoring as a conversation between structure and collapse. A Yamamoto jacket looks like it remembers being something else. His influence on Helmut Lang’s austerity and Rick Owens’s darkness is direct and acknowledged. He remains, at eighty, one of the only designers for whom the word “master” does not feel like hyperbole.