- Publisher
- V&A Publishing
- Published
- 2011
- Shelf
- fashion: Monograph
- ISBN
- 9781851776276
Monograph
Yohji Yamamoto
Ligaya Salazar
The V&A's retrospective of a designer who spent forty years arguing with the idea that clothes should flatter.
Why read it
Yamamoto's black, oversized, deliberately unfinished silhouettes were read as austerity and were really a position: that a garment should leave room for the person in it, and that wear and asymmetry are not faults to be corrected. The essays trace how a Japanese postwar sensibility met Paris and changed what a runway could show.
Why own it
The photography carries the drape, which is the entire argument and the thing no product shot ever survives. It is also the clearest worked example on this shelf of a designer building a coherent point of view and holding it for a career.
Who it is for
Anyone building a body of work rather than a season, and anyone drawn to black.
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
