Deconstructed Wedding Dress

Yohji Yamamoto’s Spring/Summer 1999 collection opened with “Here Comes The Bride” and proceeded to dismantle every assumption the song implied. The deconstructed wedding dresses — crafted from deliberately aged white cotton with visible basting stitches that fused hasty underpinnings with couture detail — were simultaneously modern and traditionally elegant, romantic and subversive, bridal and anti-bridal. Models removed one dress to reveal another beneath it, and then another, as Yamamoto explored what he called “the many stories behind the wedding dress.” One model unzipped a white pocket on her crinoline hoop skirt to produce flat shoes and a bouquet — the practical bridal kit hidden inside the impossible garment.

Tim Blanks called it one of the most enchanting shows in fashion history. Suzy Menkes termed it the zenith of Yamamoto’s career. The collection progressed in the manner of a wedding ceremony, with male models enacting secondary roles and André Leon Talley making a cameo. The fabrics — deliberately aged, worn-looking, their surfaces carrying the memory of use that had not yet occurred — floated upon bodies with a lightness that contradicted the weight of the institution they were addressing. The shock of the collection lay in the fact that Yamamoto’s work did not actually look new at all, and yet it was newer than anything else on any runway that season.

Pieces from this collection reside in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. On the rare occasions originals surface on the secondary market, they command significant collector interest — evidence that a wedding dress designed to look already worn can outlast any number of pristine gowns.