Yohji Yamamoto

Since his first notorious Paris show in 1981, the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto has extended his influence year after year. His recent collections reveal him to be firmly in the ranks of the world’s greatest stylists. This disciplined, secretive, and subversive man has, during fifteen years of ferocious work, succeeded in overturning all the rules of contemporary fashion and in rejecting every traditional clichéd notion of what a glamorous woman should look like. Yamamoto can move effortlessly from the task of making a simple white shirt to the complex cutting of an evening dress. He draws from fashion’s past and creates future. He is constructing a new approach to clothing in the post-industrial, late twentieth century world, bringing together the best of both the East and the West.
François Baudot is a journalist and writer, and a main reporter for Elle magazine. He has written numerous books on decorative arts, and his other titles in the Assouline Fashion Mémoire series are Alaïa, Chanel, Christian Lacroix, Thierry Mugler, Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli.