Yohji Yamamoto's headquarters in Paris sits in a prestigious-looking six-storey stone building on a narrow street in the bustling east end of Le Marais. The windows are frosted and there are no obvious markings on the exterior. But when you swing open the large door and enter, there is an unmistakable Yohji-ness present, even in the sparsely appointed, mostly concrete foyer. It’s as if you’d walked into a Parisian salon in the ’20s or a British bowling alley in the ’80s: you’re enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke. This, I thought, must mean that Yohji is here.
Indeed, he was. In a back corner of the sprawling ground floor showroom, the godfather of avant-garde fashion sat at a small, round table with a few associates from his Tokyo office, quietly smoking a cigarette. Racks of clothing – most in his signature black – filled the space, along with tables swarming with buyers and sales agents. Two days before, this room had been converted into a runway where Yamamoto presented his latest collection, the men’s autumn-winter 2023 line. As always, the show was packed. He’s one of the few designers who draws not just the usual industry insiders or celebrity gawpers but black-clad hordes of devoted fans. These are Yamamoto’s murder of crows, or karasu-zoku (crow tribe), the Japanese term assigned to them in the ’80s, when his fame and influence reached its first fever pitch.
Yamamoto, who is 79, has always been a rebel, unconventional and uncompromising at his core, but he remains the creative force behind a significant global fashion brand, and with the Paris Fashion Week show and after-party behind him, business had commenced. The showroom was as bustling as it would have been in the ’80s or ’90s. Seated facing out into the lively room, Yamamoto appeared to be conducting an orchestra of commerce, the cigarette his baton.
After greetings and small talk, he motioned towards the lift. Lifts in France are small and break frequently. When he suggested that this one didn’t always make it to the top floor, our destination, I secretly began to hope that it would break down temporarily with the two of us inside so that I could question him for hours, uninterrupted in a high-pressure environment. Yamamoto has never been particularly reserved when sharing thoughts about his remarkable life. He’s written two memoirs, been the subject of a documentary by Wim Wenders, and told his life story as a serialised interview in the Japanese magazine Nikkei Asia, which debuted in English last year. As far as I know, however, no journalist had ever been trapped with him in a tiny lift.
But the lift was determined and jostled us successfully to the top floor, where Yamamoto keeps his office. That gave me a moment to fully appreciate his impeccable outfit. He is, after all, as famous for his personal style as he is for the clothes he makes. The first thing I noticed was the hat. His omnipresent black fedora is, perhaps even more than the cigarette, essential to his image, like Keith Richards’s scarves or David Hockney’s glasses. It looked like something rare and significant that had been excavated by an archaeologist, or fashioned from the papery hide of something prehistoric.
As for his clothes, it was a freezing cold afternoon in Paris, and Yamamoto was gloriously layered in all kinds of gabardine – both his signature inky black and, surprisingly, midnight navy – as well as broadcloth and twill. It was assembled and draped with the easy confidence he’s cultivated through his various passions – as a black belt in karate, a rock musician, a pool shark, and of course one of the great oracles of the fashion world.
But above all, Yamamoto is a tailor, undoubtedly one of the greatest who has ever lived. He’s the unofficial Nobel laureate of cutting cloth. Japan gave him a medal of honour. The president of France named him an Officer in the National Order of Merit. His work has been the subject of a career retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum. And he is still in the studio today, cutting and draping fabric for his next collection. With the recent passing of two of his great Japanese peers, the hugely influential Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake, Yamamoto may be among the last of his kind, and he’s feeling a certain isolation and the weight of history bearing down on him.
“It’s hard to overstate the influence of Yohji specifically, and the Japanese avant-garde in general, on fashion as we know it today,” Acronym designer Errolson Hugh told me. “That’s like trying to imagine football without Brazil or MMA without jujitsu. It’s not possible. The influence is inescapable, even if you’re not aware of it. Yohji has directly influenced the way we understand volume, tailoring, the colour black, time, movement. It’s hard to get your head around once you start to think about it.”
Yamamoto’s influence on fashion has been steady for decades, but recently it has taken on a different kind of resonance. In a hyperspeed era of fleeting trends and celebrity-driven marketing – one in which new ideas have to be worn by pop superstars and influencers and palatable to the masses – the need for lasting, substantive style in fashion has never been greater. And there is the sense that it could fall to him: the great responsibility to save fashion from itself. His business was saved from bankruptcy by an investor in 2009, and has now fully recovered. With new stores opening in London, Tokyo, and one coming soon to New York – his first in the city since the last two abruptly shuttered in 2010 after his financial troubles – his murder of crows is on the rise again. Perhaps the weight bearing down on Yamamoto is as much the future as the past.
Yamamoto may be one of the most famous designers alive, but that fact does not please him much. He lives, and acts, modestly. If he thinks about his success at all, it seems to mystify him. “My philosophy of clothing has never changed,” he told me, speaking in poetic clauses, with a smooth cadence and mastery of the silent moment, which he used to tremendous dramatic effect. He has the deep, deliberate demeanour – and the perpetually burning cigarette – of a Beat poet, and the wizened, world-weary gravitas of an aged rock star.
We were sitting in a low-ceilinged room with fat wooden joists and wide-plank floorboards. This is his office, but it feels more like an apartment. The table before us was laid out with various pastries. We were joined by his executive adviser, Caroline Fabre, who worked for nearly 20 years as the right-hand woman to Azzedine Alaïa, the Tunisian couturier, before rejoining Yamamoto’s team last year, which happened to mark his 50th year in business. He still debuts new collections four times per year, mostly in Paris – two days after we meet, he will return to Tokyo to finish his women’s collection, which he will show in Paris a month later. It’s a gruelling schedule for anyone, especially someone long past retirement age. But it’s not fatigue that makes him wary. It’s the imposition of deadlines. “Art has no deadline,” he said. “It’s finished when it’s finished.”
It can be hard to identify any one characteristic that defines Yamamoto’s work – he’s been at it for so long, and has done just about everything, as the fashion archivist and vintage dealer Kyle Julian Skye explained to me. The co-founder of Middleman Store in Los Angeles – the secondhand avant-garde fashion dealer of choice for guys like Playboi Carti, Lil Yachty, and Travis Barker – Skye noted that from the perspective of young designers working today, Yamamoto is an endless source of inspiration. You can see it in the understated elegance of The Row, or the militant utilitarianism of Alyx, or the graphic knitwear from Marni. There’s probably no Rick Owens without Yohji. “Whatever you want to visualise,” he said, “Yohji probably has some interpretation, and it’s probably a magnificent interpretation.”
Errolson Hugh recalled his first Yohji Yamamoto purchase: a gabardine trench he bought at the flagship store in Tokyo in 1995. “I still buy things from that store and I still have the coat,” he told me. “I’ve taken it out of our archive countless times to wear and examine, appreciating the fabric, the cut, the details, trying to understand the ineffable nature of it.”
Then there’s the current archival-fashion boom, which has led to the rediscovery and recirculation of Yohji Yamamoto’s heavily stacked back catalogue, led by dealers like Skye. “It’s so cliché to say he’s timeless, but I think it really is,” Skye said. “It exists in its own dimension.” He noted how popular Yohji Yamamoto is among stylists and celebrities who demand exclusivity – Drake apparently buys every vintage Yohji Yamamoto silk shirt that Middleman gets in. In the volatile world of archival-fashion buying and selling, Skye noted, Yamamoto is one of the safest bets you can make, “because he has a dedicated consumer, and his designs have held up remarkably well. That Yohji silhouette still looks incredibly modern.”
Perhaps this is why it appears time and time again, year after year, on runways and in stores without Yamamoto’s name on it. Such is the perilous condition of being a designer with original ideas. I asked Yamamoto if this ever bothers him. “I don’t care,” he said gently. “It’s all right. Copy me. A copy is always a copy. I never copy anything.”
Yamamoto phrases the sentiment a little differently in Wim Wenders’s 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes. When Wenders asks, “So you’re not afraid that somebody would steal your language?” Yamamoto replies, “Nobody can do that.”
What can’t be stolen or copied is his personal history, the journey that brought him from the Tokyo red-light district, where his mother opened a dressmaking shop after his father was killed in World War II, to Le Marais. Dressing women, protecting them with cloth, is the thing that has motivated him from the beginning. “My life is thinking about women,” he told fashion critic Suzy Menkes in 2000. “First my mother – last my daughter. And in between are all the secret ones.” His ambitions and self-conceptions have always been modest. But his ideas come from a place of life and death. “I was born in a very bad moment in Japan,” he writes in the catalogue for his V&A retrospective. “There was no food to feed babies, so my generation of people are very small. So naturally I am angry about my size, so I design big sizes.” That origin story makes clear that what has resonated for so many around the world for so long about Yamamoto’s work far transcends his inexplicable ability to remain in the zeitgeist. His true appeal lies in the stark reality of what’s at stake.
At one point, I asked Yamamoto what he thought people liked about his work. He paused for a long time.
“‘You’re right!’” he finally said, not to me, but to any one of the theoretical people I was asking about. “There are so many types of liking.”
Indeed, there are so many ways to like Yohji Yamamoto. But in the beginning, the fashion cognoscenti mostly found ways to doubt him. In 1981, when he first brought his collection to Paris – shown on a runway shared by the first Comme des Garçons collection to go to Paris, designed by Yamamoto’s then lover Rei Kawakubo – one surly critic supposedly dubbed it “Hiroshima chic.” The French fashion press called them “les Japonais,” regarding them not as individual designers but as new members of a Japanese consortium in Paris that included Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake. “I’m not very happy to be classified as another Japanese designer,” Kawakubo told Women’s Wear Daily in 1983. “There is no one characteristic that all Japanese designers have.” Yamamoto hadn’t even thought of himself as Japanese until then. “I didn’t know that I was Japanese because I was born in the ruin, bombed by America,” he said to me. “I didn’t feel that I was Japanese – I’m a Tokyo boy.”
Yamamoto and Kawakubo represented a challenge to the sexed-up glamour that was driving the European fashion scene at the time. It was the arrival of a new avant-garde. The clothes were black, the shoes were flat, the shapes were amorphous, and the edges were left unhemmed. In Yamamoto’s case, fabrics were washed in rivers and dried in open air, exposed to the elements. “It is interesting to see the texture in the finished product,” Yamamoto has said of this process. “It is as if the creator’s soul is a part of the material.” His cuts were designed to obscure, not flatter, the physical form. He believed that clothes that fitted tightly to a woman’s body, the way most European designer fashion did, were made for the amusement of men. “I didn’t approach the traditional body-conscious line,” he told me, “which I hated. So, I started from the idea to let women wear men’s outfits.”
The British fashion photographer Nick Knight recalled what first struck him about Yamamoto when they met in 1986. “I felt he was so revolutionary because his clothes were about a woman’s emotions, her intellect, and her thoughts, not about her shoulders, her bust, hips, bottom, or legs,” he said. “Yohji’s fashion is deeply poetic and his were the first clothes that said a woman’s beauty and her strength is her mind, not her sexuality. That was new, and for me, extremely refreshing.”
Yamamoto developed that sensibility working in his mother’s dressmaking shop, which she opened when he was a child, after his father was killed in World War II. Their neighbourhood was overrun with gangsters and prostitutes, and he encountered violence daily – on one occasion, he recounts in his column for Nikkei Asia, he was punched in the face by a yakuza boss’s driver for accidentally hitting the driver’s car with a ball while playing catch in an alley. He started studying judo. He found that he was more athletic and dextrous than most other children, so his fighting skills improved. Eventually he’d become a black belt in karate. He also showed promise as an artist at primary school. He was praised for his painting skills, and he won a prize at an exhibition for a pair of cotton briefs he made in home economics class. “I guess I had a natural knack for cutting and sewing,” he has said.
Despite Yamamoto’s eye for style, his mother hoped he would find success in the world of business. In 1962, he went to Keio University to study law, hoping to become a prosecutor. Mostly, though, he spent his time racing the English-made Austin he purchased from a friend and playing lead guitar in his rock band, 4 Beat, which covered American groups like the Ventures and Peter, Paul and Mary, playing clubs in Roppongi and at the US military base in Asaka.
As his graduation from Keio approached, it was time for Yamamoto to start searching for a job, but he found himself stymied. “I, however, could not bring myself to participate in society,” he has said. So he travelled the world. First, he took a boat to the Soviet Union. Then he made his way into Northern Europe, through the Netherlands and Germany, and eventually to France. Visiting Paris for the first time, he felt he was somehow back where he belonged.
Back home, Yamamoto told his mother he’d had a change of heart: he’d like to work in her dressmaking shop. She was so furious that she didn’t speak to him for weeks, but eventually she accepted her only son’s wishes – with one stipulation. “If you’re serious about helping at the shop,” she said, “you should go to dressmaking school and at least learn how to cut cloth so the seamstresses don’t make fun of you.”
It was during his 20s working in his mother’s dressmaking shop that he developed his affinity for the colour black. “I used to walk the streets of Tokyo – Shibuya or Shinjuku. I saw so many colours in the streets. The people were wearing such colourful clothes,” he said. “It was kind of disturbing.” Later he discovered that outside Japan, black had its own disturbing connotation: death. (In Japanese culture, white has traditionally symbolised mourning.) Ever since, black has been his signature colour. “Black is really challenging,” he said. “You need perfect technique, for the cut and the volume.”
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In 1966, he enrolled at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, where many war widows, his mother among them, matriculated to learn the skills for dressmaking, a job they could do while staying at home with their children. Yamamoto was a star student, winning a pair of awards and a trip to Paris, where he attempted and failed to get his designs noticed by the fashion press. But back in Tokyo, his mother’s shop was thriving with him working like a couturier – taking orders, drawing designs, making measurements, and hand-stitching garments. Many of his customers, he has said, were neighbourhood bar hostesses, prostitutes, and mistresses, and they wanted their clothes to be feminine and sexy. “I was making women’s clothing so they would be doted on and favoured by men,” Yamamoto has said. “I could not bring myself to like clothing that bound up women’s bodies so they could flirt with men. I grew up watching my mother from behind as she would work, so I held strong misgivings about Japan’s ‘male-friendly society,’ and I thought it absurd.”
After two years working in his mother’s shop, in 1972, at the age of 29, Yamamoto launched his own ready-to-wear line for women, Y’s, with a radical idea: “I want women to wear more masculine clothes. Let’s make dignified clothes that working women will want to buy for themselves with their own money.”
That notion proved challenging, but at the same time as Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons began to gain a following, a demand emerged for what he has called his “colourless, wrinkled, blocky clothes.” He and Kawakubo were opening stores across Japan, giving each other a boost by occupying a greater chunk of department store floors with their avant-garde wares. “Kawakubo’s sensibility was close to my own in terms of use of colour and materials,” Yamamoto has said. “Or rather, I thought hers might be stronger and clearer than my own… since then, we have become kindred spirits in a friendly rivalry, sharing the same values in clothes-making and as fashion designers.”
When Yamamoto arrived in Paris to show his collection for the first time, he’d already been designing ready-to-wear for almost 10 years. He was a master tailor with a defined vision. That vision was briefly challenged by critics, but by then they couldn’t stop him. “I was criticised very badly,” Yamamoto told me. “So I became strong.” The following year, Yamamoto showed his collection in New York. Still relatively unknown but with some buzz from his Paris debut, he drew a massive crowd. The New York Times style reporter at the time, John Duka, called the show “something of a revelation.”
By 1979, Yamamoto had found enough success selling designs to women that he began to contemplate a new challenge: menswear. “It might sound like a joke,” he said. “People told me that the boys were afraid of the ladies wearing my outfits. For boys it was kind of scary, all black. So I decided to create a men’s line. Boys who are wearing my men’s line can be big, can be strong, then they can approach the ladies who are wearing my women’s line.”
Since the launch of Y’s, Yamamoto has been prolific in designing under various sublabels, creating Yohji Yamamoto for women and Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme for men as his flagship brands. In 2002, he launched his groundbreaking collaboration with Adidas, Y-3, drawing inspiration from New York businessmen he noticed walking briskly to their office jobs, where they would change into formal shoes. “I felt I wanted to join sneaker life,” he told me. With the Adidas partnership, which grew to include performance trainers and sports apparel, Yamamoto foresaw the advent of a new category of clothing, so-called athleisure, and the strategy of cross-brand collaboration that exists at every tier of the fashion world today. But it was only due to a stroke of fate that it happened at all, particularly that it happened with Adidas.
“When I felt I wanted to make sneakers, I first called Nike,” Yamamoto said. “‘Do you think your company can work with me?’ The answer came back very straight, and they were very nice. ‘No, thank you, Mr Yamamoto, we are only making sneakers for sport.’ It was a very, very beautiful answer. So I go to Adidas.” Here, Yamamoto laughed, seeming to acknowledge his bold pursuit of what was then a radical idea. “I called Adidas, then suddenly, they said, ‘Yes! We are interested in working with you.’ ” The Y-3 collection celebrated its 20th anniversary last year.
Y-3 precipitated not only an entire market for fashion-meets-sports streetwear crossovers but an ongoing programme of collaborations within Yamamoto’s empire, one that has included bags for Hermès, caps with New Era, and collections with Supreme. Yet even as his designs reach an ever-wider audience, he says that he doesn’t believe he has a real customer; instead, he simply feels that a connection exists between his clothing and the person who happens to buy it “by chance, or by misunderstanding.”
Yamamoto would like you to think that his success and the power of his work are merely the result of good fortune. “I was just lucky,” he told me. “It happened to me like this. My main spirit didn’t change from the beginning until now. It was luck. Luck made me like this.”
But luck can only get you so far. In the wrong hands it is wasted. Luck requires patience and understanding and mental acuity to be converted into something tangible. And any luck, after all, is your own. I asked Yamamoto what, over the course of his career, had made him the most proud. He paused for a long time. An excruciatingly long time. So long that I thought I might have offended him, or bored him so deeply that he decided to give up on the interview. But finally he started to speak again.
“I’m a little bit proud of being powerful enough to get the inspiration that is falling down,” he said. “I can catch it. This is my power. So many ideas, so many inspirations, falling down all the time in front of young designers. But they don’t catch it! They don’t look around. ‘Look up!’ I want to shout.”
When he’s not attending to his business in Paris, Yamamoto lives in Tokyo. Each morning he wakes up and takes his dog, an Akita named Rin-Chan, for a long walk. Then the two get in his car and head to the office. It’s there, behind the wheel of his Mercedes, that he often forgets he is a designer, and his special power is activated. “It’s very funny,” he said. “Don’t laugh! When I drive my car the ideas fall down. I don’t know why. I’m moving so fast, and then ideas drop down into my head.”
Yamamoto’s Life’s work is the result of a formative tragedy: the death of his father, which led his mother to become a dressmaker. He has no memory of the man, who was taken to war when Yohji was still a baby. But his presence lingers. “When I think of my father,” Yamamoto says in Notebook on Cities and Clothes, “I realise that the war is still raging inside me.” But, Yamamoto told me, he feels his father’s hand pushing him, literally, in moments when he needs him most. “So this is not my fault,” he said, speaking of his talents. “This is my father’s fault.”
Anyone who loses a parent at a young age knows how that death can remain with you all the time. Perhaps for this reason death remains a prominent theme in Yamamoto’s life and work, especially now as he approaches his 80s. In the first instalment of his Nikkei Asia column, he begins: “This bitter life… I want it to end as soon as possible.” His readiness for death made its way into our conversation too. At one point, he looked at me with an eerie twinkle in his eyes and said, “I want to jump from a high building.” Then he laughed and gestured toward Fabre, his executive adviser. “She said no,” he said. “Ten more years.”
But there’s more than morbid curiosity at the core of this fixation with his mortality. “Yohji’s beautiful palette of blue and black speaks of a deeply romantic melancholy,” Knight told me. “I feel he is saying that to know and appreciate joy and happiness you have to know loneliness and sadness, and in a similar way we feel all the more alive because we know death is always near and ultimately inevitable.”
“I need competitors,” Yamamoto told me. “And year by year, I’m losing my competitors. They’re disappearing, because of age.” The designers Yamamoto revered most throughout his career – fellow masters of the craft including Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaïa, and Alexander McQueen – have been gone for a long time now. And over the past few years, that feeling of isolation became even more pronounced. “Since I lost Mr Kenzo, Mr Issey, I feel very alone,” he told me. “This lonesome feeling, you cannot imagine. I feel so isolated.”
But this solitude has not slowed him down. Yamamoto is still hands-on with every aspect of his collections’ development, from designs to fabrics to final fittings. He’s been a fighter his whole life, and seems as determined as ever to keep fighting for the world that he’s worked for 50 years to create. “Beautiful things are disappearing every day,” he once said. If that’s true, then we all share the responsibility to save what beauty we can. Yamamoto is doing his bit. “Real fashion is disappearing,” he told me. “But as long as I’m alive, I will stop it.”
Noah Johnson is GQ’s global style director.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Yohji Yamamoto THE MASTER”
Collage Credits: Photographs, upper left: Jean-Luce Huré/Bridgeman images; bottom right: Patrick Demarchelier. Runway photographs, from left: courtesy of Yohji Yamamoto; Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; Dominiqe Maitre/WWD/Getty Images; courtesy of Yohji Yamamoto.