Wool Gabardine Hakama Pants

The hakama — the pleated, skirt-like trousers traditionally worn by samurai to symbolize discipline and grace — reappears across Yamamoto’s collections as a garment that carries centuries of Japanese history into the present without treating that history as costume. His wool gabardine hakama pants feature deep front tucks that create a wide silhouette resembling a skirt, with dramatic draping that emphasizes movement over structure. The wrinkled gabardine — Yamamoto’s signature fabric, known for its stunning drapery and sleek finish — gives the trousers a weight and fall that makes them simultaneously architectural and fluid, capable of billowing with a single step and settling back into geometric stillness.

The construction blends practicality with drama: functional pockets, button closures, and a silhouette wide enough to accommodate any body without requiring alteration. Yamamoto’s interest in asymmetry and disequilibrium is present in the way the pleats catch light unevenly, in the way the fabric gathers differently on each side of the body, in the way the garment draws attention to the birth of movement — the moment when stillness becomes walking, when the pleats shift and the silhouette transforms.

The hakama trousers remain in production through Yohji Yamamoto POUR HOMME and the Y’s line, retailing between eight hundred and fifteen hundred dollars for new pieces. They represent Yamamoto’s answer to the question of how a Japanese designer working in Paris can engage with his own cultural heritage without either erasing it or exoticizing it — by treating tradition not as a reference but as a living material, something to be worn rather than displayed.