Output details

The Fashion Revolution of Avant-Garde Japanese Designers: Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto

The article is a development of the paper presented at the 2nd Global Conference: Fashion – Exploring Critical Issues (2010), Oriel College, Oxford. It explores the impact that Japanese fashion made on the international fashion scene in the late 20th century as Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto contributed to rethinking the staples of fashion. The research that lead to the final outcome is constituted by a critical examination of the discourses that surrounded the work of the mentioned designers, especially their characterisation in terms of ‘Japaneseness’. The article has been informed by the research conducted for the Barbican Art Gallery – in the role of consultant – on the major exhibition Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion (October 2011 – February 2012). This was the first exhibition in Europe to comprehensively survey avant-garde Japanese fashion, from the early 1980s to the present. Curated by Akiko Fukai, Director of the Kyoto Costume Institute, the exhibition investigated the work of Japanese designers, and the sense of beauty embodied in their clothing. My role as consultant was to elaborate on the theme of ‘deconstruction’ and prepare the detailed timelines that feature in the exhibition catalogue.

The article focuses on the moment Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto entered the Paris scene, in the 1970s and 1980s. The impressions the ‘Japanese’ designers raised among Western critics and journalists, as well as the revolutionary valence of their creations, are examined in relation to the controversial reactions they provoked at the time within the fashion press. The question of the Japanese identity is carefully reconsidered within the study, paying attention to the positions assumed in this respect by the designers themselves.

The outcome of the research was also presented during a public talk I have given at the Barbican Art Gallery in December 2010, as part of the programme accompanying the exhibition Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion