©Axiom Films In Wim Wenders’ documentary “Notebook on Cities and Clothes,” Yohji Yamamoto asserted about himself: “I am not a fashion designer; I am a dressmaker.” This declaration seems to represent his artisanal spirit and philosophy of not being swayed by the fleeting whims and ephemeral trends that dominated Western fashion at the time. Indeed, when Yamamoto arrived in Paris in 1981 alongside Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons, this Japanese dressmaker’s avant-garde designs challenged existing fashion norms and greatly influenced fashion aesthetics. Now revered almost as a guru in fashion, his attitude he maintained of being devoted to ‘dressmaking’ has become a manifesto against the commercialisation and mass production of fashion, encapsulating the essence of what it means to be a true fashion designer. ©Adidas However, Yohji Yamamoto also had to operate his own brand within an industry driven by commercial interests and financial viability. Y-3, born in 2003 in collaboration with the sports brand Adidas, is a representative example for this standing in contrast to his self-definition in the 1980s. Collaborating with a major sports brand inherently ties one to mass production and the commercial aspects of fashion, leading him to distance himself from his ‘dressmaker’ spirit. While Y-3 has set a successful precedent for collaborations between designer and sports brands, it also signified that Yohji Yamamoto could no longer remain a dressmaker in the pure sense. ©Axiom Films Yuniya Kawamura, a professor of sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology, explained the following in her paper analysing the impact of Japanese designers like Yamamoto and Kawakubo on the fashion industry during their 1980s Paris debut: "The avant-garde Japanese designers’ arrival in Paris is said to have threatened the dominance of French fashion, but, on the contrary, they emphasized the importance of Paris as the influential fashion system. (...) These designers have challenged the clothing system but not the fashion system."1 This resonates with the situation at the time, where Yohji Yamamoto was unable to escape the commercial logic of the fashion industry. Even if not in the case of Y-3, he might have foreseen that the presenting collections at Paris Fashion Week, which was the origin of trends in the 1980s, meant that he could not remain solely a dressmaker. Considering his background in dressmaking rather than fashion design, for him, the title of dressmaker may have been closer to an honest confession about himself rather than a distinction from other fashion designers. Yet, recalling that his ‘dressmaker declaration’ is still being mentioned today as if it were the Hippocratic Oath representing the attitude of a ‘true designer’, the gap between dressmaker Yohji Yamamoto himself and the fashion brand Yohji Yamamoto is not just his individual issue. ©Getty Images / Stephane Cardinale/Corbis The comparison between a dressmaker and a fashion designer symbolises a fundamental dilemma: individuals in this industry, whether tailors, DJs, directors, or artists, etc., are subordinated to fashion designers bound by trends in this industry even to this day. Once the clothing is released as a collection and gains recognition from the public and critics under the fashion system, it naturally becomes incorporated as part of the trend, no matter how unique and subversive. This shows the contradictory situation where individual creativity and originality are incorporated into the commercial logic of the fashion industry. Simply defining one’s identity through design and collections, therefore, cannot challenge the fashion system, as Kawamura analysed over 20 years ago. The fashion system, which repeats a return to the past and traps time in a recurring cycle, makes those who are now victims become ‘one of a kind’ or even ‘design reference’ in the next generation to cooperate with this system. This is a structural problem of the fashion industry that degrades individual creativity into a style that circulates and is reproduced within the system. ©Comme des Garçons As we look back, the challenges and experiments of great 20th-century designers like Yamamoto have now become institutionalised as a style. Today, when the limits of ‘resisting design through design’ are clear, it is hard to discover the avant-garde in clothes that deviate from traditional forms reflecting individual identities and messages. The avant-garde no longer comes from solitary authors striving to create ‘new clothes’. Rather than a complete rejection of fashion design itself, the avant-garde can be found in resistance against the current system which demands constant re-creation for the sake of newness, tailored to specific seasons, stages, and markets. 1 Yuniya Kawamura (2004). The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, Fashion Theory, Volume 8, Issue 2, pp. 195-224 BY MUYO PARKMAY 31, 2024 >READ THE KOREAN VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE> READ OTHER ARTICLES