Japanese Avant-Garde

In March 1981, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto presented their collections in Paris for the first time. The reaction was immediate and hostile. French critics, accustomed to the body-conscious glamour of the European houses, described the oversize, asymmetric, predominantly black garments as rags. The press coined derisive terms — “Hiroshima chic,” “post-atomic fashion” — that revealed more about Western cultural anxieties than about the clothes themselves. What Kawakubo and Yamamoto had actually done was propose a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between the body and the garment: rather than sculpting fabric to reveal or flatter the figure, they created autonomous forms that existed in conversation with the body, hovering around it, concealing and revealing according to a logic that had nothing to do with Western ideals of proportion or sex appeal.

The philosophical roots were distinct from European fashion’s preoccupations. Where Western design treated the body as a known quantity to be enhanced, the Japanese avant-garde treated it as a variable — something that the garment could question, obscure, or reimagine. Kawakubo’s “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” collection of 1997 took this inquiry to its most radical conclusion, padding garments to distort the body’s silhouette entirely. Yamamoto’s approach was gentler but no less subversive: his draped, oversized garments in black created a space of privacy and self-possession that rejected fashion’s demand that the wearer be available for visual consumption.

Issey Miyake, whose work predated the 1981 moment, shared the movement’s interest in the space between body and cloth but pursued it through technology and material innovation rather than philosophical confrontation. Together, these designers established Tokyo — and later, the Japanese fashion schools — as a permanent counterweight to the Paris-Milan-New York axis. Junya Watanabe, Chitose Abe of Sacai, and Tao Kurihara all emerged from this lineage, each extending the movement’s central question: what can a garment be, if we refuse to accept what we have been told it must be?