YAMAMOTO THE FRINGE OF TIME
There are old men (年配の方) whom time seems to have forgotten. Yohji Yamamoto is one of them, his body bent by the years, perhaps also by the craft of couture to which he has sacrificed his life. The old man still deigns to appear and, in the evening of his existence, continues to cast upon the runways the strange shadows of his imagination.
The man my father once had brought over from the Empire of the Rising Sun returns today with a collection of fringes. Fringe: had it been only one letter away, it might have been filth. But in Yamamoto’s world, even what hangs, frays and unravels retains an extraordinary nobility, and whatever threatens to fall still carries itself with grace. The fringes are everywhere; at first they stream down along curves held in place by metallic threads, as though the garment, weary of its own materiality, were seeking to escape itself.
The first silhouettes possess something sculptural and spectral: the woman is no longer quite dressed; she is surrounded by lines, threads and movement. Elsewhere, the fringes climb across the shoulders like the last braids of an old military uniform slowly coming undone. They envelop the bodies in geometric lattices; long coils sway through the air like the fibers of a dreamcatcher abandoned to the wind.
Then come the coats. Their construction remains severe, almost monumental, yet their fabric appears to have lost its weft. Nothing would remain but the warp, loose and floating, as though the fabric itself had begun to disappear. The knits undergo the same metamorphosis: opaque for a moment, transparent the next, leaving behind suspended threads—the remnants of a garment that seems to be unraveling before our eyes.
Everything here seems to speak of time. Threads hang, fabrics fade, braids come undone, bodies pass behind veils. And yet nothing truly dies. For the old man is still there. Yohji Yamamoto remains standing before the filth of time, his fringes offering a few final acts of insolence; and while everything around him seems intent on coming undone, he continues, stubbornly, to sew.
FM
