Yamamoto

Yamamoto was born in Tokyo on 3 October 1943. He never knew his father, who died in Manchuria during World War II; his dressmaker mother Yumi reared him.  Yumi encouraged her son to become an attorney—he graduated with a law degree from Keio University but never practiced.  The lure of becoming a designer, however, pulled Yamamoto into fashion. 

After completing his university studies in 1966, Yamamoto studied fashion design at the famous Bunkafukuso Gakuin, a fashion institute in Tokyo.  Despite his skills as a master craftsman, he started his career as an anonymous creator around 1970.  Two years later he marked his own designs under the label Y’s.  Clothing under this label is now considered to be Yamamoto’s lower-priced or “bridge,” line.

Yohji Yamamoto is widely regarded as ranking among the greatest fashion designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  He is one of the few in his profession who have successfully broken the boundaries between commodity and art, by creating clothing that ranges from basics like athletic shoes and denim jeans to couture-inspired gowns that are nothing short of malleable mobile sculptures.  Lauded as a blend of master craftsman and philosophical dreamer, Yamamoto has balanced the seemingly incompatible extremes of fashion’s competing scales.

Sources

Mears, Patricia. "Yamamoto, Yohji." The Berg Fashion Library. The Berg Fashion Library, 2005. Web. 15 Feb. 2013. <http://www.bergfashionlibrary.com/view/bazf/bazf00651.xml>.

Image Source

"Dress." The Berg Fashion Library. The Berg Fashion Library, n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2013. <http://www.bergfashionlibrary.com/view/v-a/13361.xml>.