‘‘Let me tell you a story I’ve never told before.’’

By Angelo Flaccavento
Photographs by Juergen Teller

What happens when Rick Owens interviews ‘the master’ Yohji Yamamoto…

Very few designers can be talked about, in awe, as revolutionaries who changed the course of contemporary fashion. Yohji Yamamoto is one. Since arriving in Paris from Tokyo in 1981 alongside Rei Kawakubo, and after taking the world by storm with layered, twisted, monochromatic creations that defied Western notions of beauty and radically subverted preconceived ideas on how clothing and body should relate, Yamamoto has become a mainstay and an unavoidable influence. Without him there would have been no 1990s deconstructivism or Belgian conceptualism.

With remarkable consistency, working mostly in black and using fuid silhouettes, Yamamoto has built a massive body of work that is a testament to his sensitive, yet ceaselessly challenging tailoring. As an expert pattern cutter who can ‘listen’ to fabric, Yamamoto has kept innovating from the inside, oblivious to passing trends and fads. His ideas are built on deep foundations and sit inside the seams of every piece that bears his label. The less Yohji changes, the more he changes, which makes him unique and enduring. Yet, there is more. Yamamoto understood very early the power of the image, and the necessity to be open to new ways of doing business. The catalogues he orchestrated in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s with trusted collaborators, including Marc Ascoli, Peter Saville, M/M (Paris), Nick Knight and Max Vadukul, are unique feats of image engineering and visual storytelling. To this day, they still stand as landmarks to which the rest of
the system constantly refers as unbeatable exemplars of emotional modernity. Equally groundbreaking has been his long-standing Y-3 collaboration with Adidas, which launched in 2003, back when merging sport and fashion was an exception, and a highly risky one at that.

A punk at heart, Yohji Yamamoto remains provocative and soulful, macho and poetic – and notoriously a man of few, considered words. For System, he agreed to sit down to talk with Rick Owens, another master of the monochromatic, deft pattern-cutter and designer of utmost coherence. Owens’ brutalist fantasy of decay might appear to sit miles from Yohji’s suave poetry of black, but perhaps not. Let’s just let Yohji and Rick do the talking.

Rick Owens: I’m sorry I’m late, we were at the Balenciaga show. I rarely go to shows, but I was just in the mood. And it’s not always about the clothes, it’s also about the politics and the ceremony and the pageantry. The clothes are only fve percent of the whole theatre. I have a pretty quiet life, but every once in a while, I feel like being part of that theatre. I feel like this is our generational aesthetic arena, and I want to be a participant. You sometimes go to shows, right, Yohji?

Yohji Yamamoto: Not recently. The last time I went to a fashion show, I was invited by Marc Jacobs. About 15 years ago. Takashi Murakami was sitting next to me, he had designed some of it…

Rick: Oh yes, the Louis Vuitton collection they did together. Did you like it?

Yohji: I like Marc, he is a great friend, a young friend. But I didn’t enjoy that show.

Rick: I can generally find something to enjoy in every show; I just appreciate being somewhere special, in a nice big space. Anyway, I’m so happy to be doing this with you.

Angelo Flaccavento: Both of you trained as pattern-cutters, working with scissors and fabric, not just on clothing as an idea or a drawing. That seems like an interesting place to start.

Rick: It does. Yohji, where did you learn to make patterns?

Yohji: Patterns? Well, let me start by telling you about my strongest memory from when I graduated from university…

Rick:…which university did you go to?

Yohji: I went to a famous university in Tokyo, I passed the exam to get in there, and once there I had around 10 or 12 very close friends. They were the sons of owners of big companies or of famous shops. I mean, rich families. I however was poor, and I had lost my father, too.

Rick: How old were you when you lost your father?

Yohji: I was a baby. So, my mother made up her mind not to marry again. She also made up her mind to work hard and bring me up. She was working as a seamstress, just in the local neighbourhood. So, when I was studying for university exams and preparing to enter the world of business, I felt like it was already unfair, because I was living just with my mother, and we were so poor. Not sad, just poor.

Rick: Did you realize you were poor?

Yohji: I remember one time I was invited to a friend’s Christmas party; they had a really gorgeous house with a tennis court in the garden, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, this is not my world.’ Anyway, after my graduation, I asked my mother, ‘Can I help you, mother, with your dressmaking work?’ She didn’t speak to me for two weeks after that, because she had spent money on this expensive education for me, for the past three and a half years, and she was so shocked by my decision to want to do sewing. Finally, she gave up and told me, ‘Yohji, if you really want to help
me, you’ll have to go to dressmaking school, and at the very least you’ll need to learn about cutting. Really learn.’ So I really learned.

Rick: Do you think your mother deciding never to remarry had any influence on how you think about women?

Yohji: Oh, yes. In my life, starting with my mother, I have always had the feeling that women are stronger than men.

Rick: I agree with you; they have to be. Is your mother still alive?

Yohji: Yes, she is 103 years old. She is now in an old people’s home. She is still healthy, but she’s lonely, because she has to live by herself, without family. So, I visit her two or three times a week.

Rick: Is she in Tokyo?

Yohji: Yes, very near to my house.

Rick: My mother is 87 now and we are having conversations about where she is going to go and live.

Yohji: Now is the time to think about that.

Rick: She is very healthy, but we recognize that she is getting slower. She comes to Paris twice a year for the women’s shows, but we are having the conversation of where it is she wants to be. It is not easy trying to figure that out. It’s not horrible to think about, though; it’s interesting.

Yohji: It is interesting. I am afraid that my mother will pass away. I can’t imagine how deep and how strong the emotion will be if I lose her. I just want her to live… forever.

Rick: I hear you. That’s mortality. Do you think about mortality and do you think about legacy?

Yohji: I don’t like it to be called legacy; I’m just a man.

Rick: Yes, you’re just a man, but not really. You’ve done a lot and it’s something that will be remembered for a very long time. You’ve contributed to the culture during your lifetime and you
have been recognized for excellence. I mean, you know that. Do you never really worry about how you want to be remembered? Do you keep archives?

Yohji: No, I don’t like that. [Laughs]

Rick: That’s just reckless! Good for you. You get to do it however you want.

Yohji: Just forget everything.

Rick: I don’t think that is a bad idea. I have never actually kept archives either.

Yohji: Good.

Rick: But whenever anybody is creating something, they are expressing something and someone like you is very careful to tell your message in a very precise way. You’re not sloppy. When you put
all of your work together, that is your big expression, and I think somewhere you want to protect that so it is not misunderstood. Don’t you ever think about somebody buying the name Yohji Yamamoto 50 years after your death and horrible clothes will be out there with your label in them?

Yohji: That is a terrible idea!

Rick: Yes, a nightmare, I know. Maybe you are right to not think about it at all.

Yohji: [Laughs]

Rick: I was going to bring you this book by John Richardson, do you know him? He writes about cultural fgures, and he has a book called Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters.

Yohji: What a title!

Rick: Isn’t it after Jean Cocteau: ‘monstres sacrées’? Anyway, it is about creative people who have done significant work. I love the way John Richardson analyses them because he does it in a very academic way, but also in a very salacious way. There is a lot of gossip, sex and alcohol. It’s fun. I am always looking at the lives of creative people.

Yohji: Do you have Saint Laurent’s book?

Rick: I have it, but I haven’t read it yet.

Yohji: You are right, don’t read it.

Rick: The reason I want to give you this John Richardson book is because I think you should be in one of those books. You should be described.

Yohji: Described?

Rick: Well, I think the word icon is a bit melodramatic, but I think an ‘aesthetic contributor to culture’ is practical and a nice way of putting it. Do you think of
that as fattering? Or is it overly dramatic, or do you prefer to consider yourself as just a guy?

Yohji: Just a guy.

Rick: Well, you’re not!

Yohji: I’m just a guy who can make a dress, who can make an outft. I can cut. That’s it. I’m a craftsman.

Rick: Do you live alone in Japan?

Yohji: No, I live with my family.

Rick: Do you have kids?

Yohji: Yes, I have a son who has just recently graduated from the Lycée International [near Paris].

Rick: How old is he?

Yohji: Twenty. And from my first marriage, I have two children, one son and one daughter.

Rick: Of course, your daughter is Limi [Feu]. She followed in your footsteps, but what do your other children do?

Yohji: Limi is working, and her older brother is floating.

Rick: Did you ever float?

Yohji: Me? I maybe floated for two years. Did you?

Rick: Yeah, I floated; I really floated.

Yohji: Really? Before I started the ready-to-wear company, I floated for more than two years. I was travelling the world, by myself.

Rick: That doesn’t sound like floating to me, that sounds like learning.

Yohji: Yes, but it was dangerous. I rented a car and went to Tunisia. I didn’t even have a map. I was driving the car for a long time in the desert and suddenly the scenery became all white; then I saw a military car that had stopped, and two soldiers with guns stopped me in the desert. That moment I felt, ‘Oh, this is the end of my life.’ They asked me to show my passport, which they checked, and then finally they said ‘go’. The next trip I did was through Indonesia; I went again by myself, by car, without any schedule or map. I like doing that.

Rick: One thing I’m curious to know – how much time do you spend in your studio? Like five days a week? Seven days a week?

Yohji: Almost every day, all year.

Rick: But you know how to protect your privacy and your personal comfort and your health?

Yohji: I’m a genius at protecting my privacy. I have a big dog. And I am always moving with the dog. I drive, so I’m with the dog 24 hours a day, and that makes people think Yohji is lonely, he’s only living with dog. But it is a big lie.

Rick: You are not lonely at all. I felt very comfortable alone for a long time and then things changed and it was a surprise, and I wasn’t as comfortable as I used to be. It was a shock to me because until then I had had a very organized life. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t.

Yohji: I never really organized my life at all.

Rick: Oh, mine is very organized.

Yohji: Really? How can you live like that? I feel strongly that it is not me who is doing this, and that maybe it is my father who is guiding me to live my life in this way.

Rick: Did you know your father well?

Yohji: He died at the end of the war, in 1944, when I was a baby, just one year old. He was put into the army and disappeared and never came back. But still today, I really feel that he is pushing me, guiding me. It is a very strange sensation.

Rick: How has that affected your relationship with your son who’s in college?

Yohji: We have a very good relationship because he has inherited almost no DNA from me![Laughs] He doesn’t like sport; he doesn’t like fighting. He is always worrying about himself, about getting sick, like, ‘Father, I’ve got a cold, I have a fever.’ I am the total opposite. But I do like him.

Rick: Because your father was absent, does that make you overcompensate?

Yohji: Let me say this. People around my mother pushed her into organizing a funeral for my father; my mother always believed he would come back. She waited for a long time, but finally, she gave up, and so she prepared a big funeral for him, when I was four or five years old. And at that moment I got so angry with other adults – my anger with society started at that moment. I said to myself, ‘I am not going to join this society. I want to become an outsider or even get into crime.’

Rick: What crime would you commit? What would you be comfortable doing?

Yohji: Anything.

Rick: Murder?

Yohji: Could be.

Rick: Could you hunt? Have you ever shot anything? Have you ever shot an animal?

Yohji: Yes, just once.

Rick: What was it?

Yohji: It was a big elk. I was with my karate master. We went hunting and I had to use the rifle. During the daytime I didn’t want to kill the animal because they are so charming and cute, so I didn’t shoot. But when the sun was coming down and it was becoming dark, my karate master said, ‘We’re not going in until you’ve hit one.’ So, in the evening, I saw these two shining red eyes in the distance. I desperately wanted to go back to the hotel because I was very tired, so I focused in the centre of these two eyes, then I shot.

Rick: That is amazing. So you shot the elk. Did you go look at it?

Yohji: Yes.

Rick: And it was dead?

Yohji: It was lying down with its big antlers. The next day, the cook served me the elk for dinner, and I had to eat it.

Rick: Was it hard to eat?

Yohji: Yes, because I had killed it. That was so painful.

Rick: Was it really painful?

Yohji: Yes, imagine!

Rick: Oh, I don’t think I could do it.

Yohji: It was so terrible.

Rick: The funny thing is in the last two years I have gone shooting a lot. It is just something I have thought about doing, so I have been going to shooting ranges.

Yohji: My karate master has taken me to shooting practice. I was shooting with a Magnum .45 – it was so heavy, and the shock of pulling the trigger is so strong that you fly back. After three, four or five shots, I discovered how to shoot. Do you have any reason for doing the shooting?

Rick: I’m wondering if subliminally I do. [Laughs] I thought I would go all the way with the masculinity fantasy. And it is really a very physical thing and it is fun, and when you hit the target right you can feel it in your body. I don’t know how that works, but you almost feel like the bullet pressing against your own body… it’s a funny thing. Anyway, one thing I wanted to ask you about was, what do you think of young designers?

Yohji: They’re OK; they are not my enemy.

Rick: I sometimes look at the new generation of designers and think that it’s their job to provoke me, to insult me, and to react to me. But I don’t see enough passion or strength out there.

Yohji: You are right.

Rick: But I do see a lot of calculation. Like, ‘How do I optimize Instagram?’ ‘How do I optimize my resources?’ And I think that is the new aesthetic, the thing that is supposed to offend us. The fact that they have rejected craft and poetry, and they have made it all about cynicism and calculation. I am not saying that is a bad thing at all, because it is exciting to see someone do something as a reaction. But I don’t know how long that is going to last. It’s going to be funny to see how it evolves. Do you get excited by young fashion sometimes?

Yohji: Never. It is so boring.

Angelo: Were you both seeking to shock when you started out in fashion? Because Yohji-san, when you arrived in Paris, you shocked people with all the black you used, and all the deconstruction.

Yohji: I didn’t mean to shock. I just came to Paris to open a small shop.

Rick: Come on, Yohji! I don’t think I believe that. I think you knew exactly what you were doing! You knew that what you were doing looked very different to all of the other stuff. [Laughs]

Yohji: Let me tell the truth. I was living with Rei Kawakubo, for eight years or so, and we started a ready-to-wear company, totally different company from ours now, and we lived together, and after five or six years, we had almost enough shops in Japan, so I said to Rei, ‘Rei, why don’t we go to Paris, to open a new shop?’ She told me, ‘No, no, no, my company is too busy. I do not have time to open a new shop in Paris; it is impossible.’ So, I said, ‘OK, Rei, I will go first without you. Sorry.’ So, I came here and found, in a very narrow street, called Rue de Cygne, a very, very small shop. And then at the time of the opening, one of the buyers or maybe a journalist came up to me and said, ‘Hey Yohji, Rei is making a show in a hotel here in Paris.’ Without telling me.

Rick: I didn’t know this…

Yohji: This has long been a secret I’ve not told before. I said, ‘What?’ As you know, buyers are very eager to find new things, because they own shops and hire people, so they have to sell. A lot of buyers came to the shop opening; then Rei did her show in that hotel. In the newspaper it said, ‘The Yellow Army Arrives.’ But it was only two of us. I mean, you call this is an army? I was surprised. It started from that point, that moment, in that way. Seventy percent of journalists didn’t like us, what we were doing. I liked very much WWD from New York. They did a big article: put a Yohji Yamamoto look and one of Rei’s looks, and put a big cross on the page, and wrote in Roman letters, ‘sayonara’. I liked it!

Rick: You got to admit Women’s Wear Daily was fun then; they were bitchy and sassy.

Yohji: Yes, very fun.

Rick: But, wait. You didn’t even know Rei was in Paris? You just heard, all of a sudden, that she was doing a show here?

Yohji: Yes, I was so surprised.

Rick: Were you mad?

Yohji: A little bit.

Rick: Were you still together then?

Yohji: It was the first moment that I started to think we would separate. I didn’t cry too much because I understood. I could understand how she felt. But in my company, my employees and investors got angry with me. Maybe they felt that I had betrayed them.

Rick: Looking back, is there any other result that you could have foreseen? Like in a relationship, you might think, if I had listened or behaved in another way, would things be different? Do you look back and think, I wish I had handled things differently?

Yohji: I don’t like to look back. I am always thinking about the next thing. I was just afraid of myself becoming blind to new things, new emotions. I have strong memories of the show when I did only wedding dresses. It was very successful with the press.

Rick: A lot of people have strong memories of that show.

Yohji: And I was invited to New York as the designer of the year. But on the business side, it was so bad – I mean, who would buy that wedding dress?

Rick: I’m sure you sold them in black, didn’t you? Didn’t you have versions in black, didn’t you have other things in the collection? I mean, do you ever think: ‘This is what I want to make, and this is what people will want to buy from me, and so I need to balance that’?

Yohji: Yes, that is the reason I made a ready-to-wear company. I kept working and helping in my mother’s shop, and so many, funny-proportioned people visited, and I took measurements and I did fittings, and gradually I started thinking to myself, ‘Why do I have to do this?’

Rick: Do what?

Yohji: You know, kneeling down, in front of a fat woman, pinning the hem of a skirt… I started feeling I wanted to make men’s outfts for women. That was the frst time that I decided to really start a company. Men’s outfts for women. At that moment, it was so crazy and new. For the first four or five collections, buyers didn’t buy anything. And after six collections, the business was drying up…

Rick: Was this in Paris or Tokyo?

Yohji: In Tokyo. And when the company became just a little bit richer and famous, my mother told me, ‘Hey Yohji, we started our life from zero, maybe even from minus, so we can come back to zero, no problem.’ It was the nicest thing she could have ever said. I don’t need to care about the company’s mistakes or when it’s going down. This word from my mother, it helped me a lot. It still does, any time I make a mistake. It’s still keeping me going now.

Rick: You have nothing to lose. I have that attitude, too. I can do whatever I want. But after a while, you have a sense that you are having a conversation with people; you are saying something and people are responding by buying your clothes. It is a very clinical conversation, very one-sided, but it is still a conversation. People are connecting to you.

Yohji: Well, I always say that misunderstanding is also understanding. It is a continuity of misunderstanding. Until now, I don’t think I am doing very well.

Rick: You don’t think you are doing very well?

Yohji: People are misunderstanding and buying.

Rick: You want them to understand and stop buying?

Yohji: In my business life, I have no memory of having been understood.

Rick: Do you want to be understood?

Yohji: That is a very delicate question.

Rick: I think that everyone wants to be understood.

Yohji: Myself, I don’t care.

Rick: You wouldn’t express yourself so carefully if you didn’t care, and you express yourself very carefully.

Yohji: You are right.

Rick: There must be moments when you feel people connected with it and understood it, when you said something, it was received, and it was the perfect fit. There have to be moments like that, otherwise you would lose motivation, wouldn’t you?

Yohji: In my mind, I feel that if I start to feel satisfed with my work, then maybe I’ll lose my motivation.

Rick: Yes, but you must know sometimes like, ‘Oh, that came out good, you must feel that.’

Yohji: Very few people feel that.

Rick: You know what? I think that journalism is one of the best things on the planet, because you get to knock on somebody’s door and just ask them all these questions – it’s fantastic!

Angelo: Rick when did you first become aware of Yohji’s work? Was it an epiphany?

Rick: Let’s see… I might have seen an image of that Women’s Wear Daily ‘X’ page that Yohji was just talking about. When did you first show in Paris?

Yohji: Around 1980.

Rick: I’m trying to think where I was in 1980… I was in between high school and college. I was always conscious of what was happening in fashion, and that would have had a great impact, so it was around the time that you were in Paris, and I have followed your work ever since. Tell me, when you’re in Paris these ****days, do you have an apartment here?

Yohji: Yes, I do.

Rick: How long has she been working with you?

Yohji: Almost 40 years. So, about 20 years ago, when she was 43 or 44 years old, she suddenly called me to the fitting room, just the two of us, and she started telling me, ‘Yohji-san, I’m thinking of having a baby.’ ‘Whose baby?’ ‘Your baby, of course!’ And I said, ‘Really?’ At the time, I was already 52 or 53 years old, so what can I do for that? So, I went to the very famous Keio University Hospital in Tokyo, to check if I still had some power, you know, to make a baby. The answer was very funny. The doctor said, ‘Yes, you still have it, but you’ll just have to move very slowly.’ I made a success of the challenge. She called me, ‘You made it!’ And so this is my youngest son. Later she decided to move to Paris with him. They abandoned me in Tokyo alone and they came to Paris together. So, that is the reason I have the apartment here.

Rick: Wow. What an incredible story. That really proves how powerful the relationship can be with a pattern-maker. I know that if I gave things to a different pattern-maker, something would gradually start changing. It is a very sensitive relationship.

Yohji: It really is.

Rick: I’m curious, what does your apartment in Paris look like?

Yohji: We actually just moved again this year. It’s now on Boulevard Raspail.

Rick: But your son and his mother moved here years ago?

Yohji: Yes. We hired a driver who has a really gorgeous Mercedes. He drove my son to the Lycée International in St-Germain-en-Laye every day, for 10 years. I kept sending money for the driver. For 10 years, no joke! And finally, after 10 years here in Paris, they came back to Tokyo.

Rick: How often would you come to Paris?

Yohji: I would only come here for the shows. Four times a year. And then when the Y-3 collections with Adidas started, it became six times a year.

Rick: Is your Mercedes parked outside? We should go for a ride now.

Yohji: My driver told me that his first client was Ken Takakura, a very famous actor in Japan, who was a real gentleman. And his next client was Michael Jackson. And his third one is me.

Angelo: When you started working with Adidas and you added another layer to your workload, you also made a very interesting step outside of your fashion comfort zone…

Yohji: There was a moment when I felt like fashion, and what I was doing, had come too far from the language of the street. At the same time, I felt the sneaker movement starting, especially in New York. You’d see businessmen in the mornings running to the office wearing sneakers; they’d arrive and change,and get rid of the sneakers. I made a phone call to Nike and said, ‘I am very interested in sneakers. Does your company ever want to do a collaboration with a designer?’ Then came a very nice answer, ‘I’m sorry Mr Yamamoto, but we are only going to support non-fashion designers, thank you very much.’ So then I called Adidas who said, ‘So Yohji, you want to do something with us?’ And I did. This was 16 years ago. I really felt I had come too far from the street and so Y-3 changed that. Sometimes, sneaker design is too ugly, but I want the sense of the street.

Rick: I saw some sneakers at Balenciaga today that were sensationally ugly. They were so ugly that they were fascinating – and I almost wanted them!

Angelo: Neither of you seem to get tired of the colour black. It seems to be a whole range of expression for you.

Yohji: I have always been very interested in cutting and making a silhouette on a woman’s body. A woman’s body is like a desert. It’s beautiful. And I was only
interested in the movement of the fabric on the body, so I didn’t want to use colour. White or black. That’s enough. So finally, I totally forgot to think about colour. That’s it.

Rick: I think there is a lot of chaos in the world, so I like to see just something black in all of that chaos. Yohji, when you do decide to use colour you use it brilliantly.

Yohji: When I use colour, I choose colour that can fight with black. Strong colours, otherwise, the colour always loses the game. Black is very strong.

Rick: Black is very strong. That’s a good ending, because I’ve got to go piss now.

Angelo: One last question, Yohji-san. You have ‘No Future’ – a punk slogan – written on the back of your jacket. Do you feel like a punk?

Yohji: Always. And people my age have more future than young people.

Taken from System No. 14.