Yohji Yamamoto. Letter to the future
Yohji Yamamoto (Tokyo, 1943) is a Japanese fashion designer who has been reflecting on the body through the structure of clothes since 1970, thus from the beginning of his career in anonymity. These are treated and thought of as multiform sculptures that over the course of the seasons move from liquidity to complexity, making use of a few colors. Primarily black, followed by splashes of red balanced by gray and multiple shades of white. The same are the protagonists of an exhibition in Milan, in the Gallery of 10 Corso Como, which can be visited from May 16 to July 31, 2024 and is curated by Alessio de’Navasques, professor of Fashion Archives at the Sapienza University of Rome, who heads a program dedicated to fashion culture promoted by the same famous concept store recently renovated.
The exhibition “Yohji Yamamoto. Letter to the future” in Milan
The retrospective Yohji Yamamoto. Letter to the future comes 13 years after the last one dedicated to the fashion designer by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. It is a rather rare event, taking the opportunity to exhibit 25 archival garments from the Yohji Yamamoto Collection from different eras and seasons, from 1986 to 2024. What emerges is an ambivalent and poetic relationship with time, in an asynchronous flow of forms and material asymmetries. This is tangible even today, more than 50 years into his career, in Yamamoto’s collections. In fact, de’Navasques, who set up each dress without stage artifices and on sartorial busts similar to those of an atelier, achieved a perfect mix by alternating garments of yesterday with others of today. The main character always remains only one: the radical ability to dismantle and reassemble archetypes. Instead, the secondary character in the Japanese creative’s vision is color.
The clothes in the exhibition “Yohji Yamamoto. Letter to the future” in Milan
“Yohji Yamamoto’s message is that of the body acting on clothing, through its imperfect and welcoming forms, which encapsulate all kinds of bodies and spirits,” says curator de’Navasques, “we are witnessing a historical moment in which, just as was the case in the years of his debut in Europe, physicality seems to have freed itself from superstructures and gender stereotypes, and yet we are overexposed, continually judged, as happens on social media. Hence the idea of a retrospective that also seems to represent a process of dressing and undressing, evolution and involution. This is evidenced by the output of Yamamoto’s creative genius, namely the faux-cul of the red silk coat in the Winter 1986/87 collection, a nineteenth-century costume that becomes a hybrid with a fitted jacket, the three-dimensional robe manteaus in Winter 2023/24, and a dress at the center of the Spring 1999 performance show, where the models shed their crinolines, veils and layers of fabric revealing the essence of the form. Thus, the dress in the object condition trumps the monumentality often celebrated in fashion shows. It is a letter to the future, quoting the title, or rather to “tomorrow” bringing back old words of the designer, without forgetting the present and the past.