Yohji Yamamoto became internationally renowned as an avant-garde fashion designer with his minimalism in the 1980s and since then has collaborated with everyone from Adidas to Hermès, from Sir Elton John to German dramatist Heiner Müller. This month, the V&A in London opens its retrospective on Yamamoto\’s work, which will be open until mid-July.
The curators of this exhibition have clearly aimed for the deceptive simplicity of Yamamoto\’s own minimalist designs: they are housed in one room only, a large area with grey walls, a bright white floor and steel fittings. The whole space can be walked through in under three minutes and there is not much to read in the way of captions and blurbs. This can, at first, make the exhibition seem rather underwhelming, but there is more to it than initially meets the eye.
You can spend a sizeable amount of time swotting up on the finer details of Yamamoto\’s career if you follow the multimedia timeline of headphones and plasma screens around the edge of the room. Watching his designs on the small screen does not, however, seem all that exciting when confronted with the real pieces themselves, scattered across the centre of the exhibition space. These are modelled by free-standing busts so you can get right up close to them and examine the fabric, the stitching and every other detail, tempting visitors to touch the pieces. The effect is that the exhibition feels more like a high fashion boutique than a museum and the designs seem all the more exciting and modern. This is an imaginative and unobtrusive way of presenting Yamamoto\’s retrospective which leaves it to the designs themselves to make an impression.
Yamamoto\’s pieces have been selected carefully to exhibit his full breadth of vision: therefore, although he is often associated with black which he is said to believe is the only genuine colour, you would not guess this from the exhibition alone. Some of the most striking pieces are a man\’s floral suit and a bright red dress with an ingeniously engineered and almost gravity-defying skirt. However, the black pieces which do make the cut are some of the most notable designs in the exhibition: a stunningly simplistic evening dress with a glittering purse built into the back, and a trouser suit featuring an enormous plait of fabric over the torso. Even with the black pieces, minimalism may not be the first word that springs to mind when you see this selection of Yamamoto\’s work. Above all else, his designs smack of imagination and innovation. Yamamoto is as important for the influence he has had upon the fashion world as he is for the actual pieces he has designed and this exhibition allows you to take a very close look at the careful engineering and the creative detail of his work which has so inspired contemporary design.
