Fashion CENTRAL
The history of Japanese fashion is no more evident than in the fascinating hub of Tokyo.
Japanese designers have had a profound and singular impact on global fashion. No other country has been as successful in presenting a cohesive fashion narrative about its unique style and changing vision, nor in nurturing second and third design generations that work together with a sense of teamwork rarely seen elsewhere.
Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, have revolutionised the way we think of fashion, followed by a second generation of designers, such as Junya Watanabe and Jun Takahashi, and a new generation, including Tao Kurihara, Akira Naka and Hiroaki Ohya.
What each generation shares is a unique sensibility of Japanese design and its sense of beauty embodied in clothing, which often means questioning existing Western aesthetic ideals. When Japanese designers burst onto the international fashion scene in Paris in 1981, they deconstructed existing fashion rules and reconstructed their own vision of what it could be, using concepts such as asymmetry and minimalism to produce radical silhouettes, frayed and distorted fabrics and sizeless garments.
What sets Japanese designers apart from their American and European counterparts is an immersion in traditional Japanese culture and a desire to reinterpret it and make it relevant for today.
The capital of Japanese fashion is certainly Tokyo, a beguiling mix of the radical, the traditional and the now that is home to global names, emerging designers and the flagship stores of Japan’s top luxury brands. Traditional crafts and kimono jostle for floor space with futuristic, cutting-edge designs in a city that has a plethora of fashion districts that are as diverse as they are plentiful.
Yamamoto and Miyake both have flagship stores in Tokyo, where Miyake references the traditional art of
origami with his Pleats Please line, which uses new fabric technology to create garments that are washable, wrinkle-free and elegant. His APOC range (A Piece Of Cloth) was built around the invention of a way to cut an entire garment from a single piece of cloth, while Yamamoto also explores new techniques of cutting and finishing garments that often appear frayed and distorted, but always with an artist’s understanding of sculpture and texture.
A rich lineage and the mentorship by these designers of the next generation, including Watanabe and Takahashi, has resulted in a design continuum and a canon unique in the world.
A key concept in Japanese design is wabi-sabi, wabi meaning “without decoration” and sabi meaning “atmospheric and old”. This translates to garments that find beauty in imperfection and an aesthetic that meditates on the wonder of flaws and chaos disrupting the natural order. Takahashi explores
wabi-sabi with extraordinary outerwear referencing traditional Japanese textiles and the beauty of nature, which can involve anything from a royal ruff at the neck to faces masked with flowers. As Watanabe has said: “I have never thought about whether or not I am successful … I am not interested in the mainstream.” Instead, he creates mesmerising garments that are perplexing, fascinating and seductive in equal measure. Sacai designer Chitose Abe takes a more feminine, but no less conceptual, approach that mixes colour, pattern and traditional tailoring techniques, and has won a legion of new fans through her shows at Paris Fashion Week.
In sum, Japanese designers eschew trends and the mainstream in favour of testing the sculptural and philosophical possibilities of cloth and thread, which recalls a comment from the late couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga. “A couturier,” Balenciaga said, must be “an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for colour, a musician for harmony and philosopher for temperance”.
The beauty of Japanese design is its reimagining of fashion that balances tradition with innovation to celebrate all of the above qualities in a way that is consistent with its country of origin yet utterly unique when compared to anywhere else.