Into the Soul of Fabric

By JAY COCKS

Japanese designers shape a fashion revolution in the West

If there are, say, ten great fashion designers in the world right now, then at least three of them are Japanese. These are not international celebrity couturiers, doing cunning variations on conventional forms. These are revolutionaries, insurgents whose aim is to modify, sometimes even change, the shape and form of clothing itself.

Yohji Yamamoto. Rei Kawakubo. Issey Miyake.

They are widely, wildly respected among the feudal states of fashion, and are beginning to be recognized in the big world outside. Even for people who may have trouble pronouncing the names on the labels in a boutique, there is a growing perception of the changes these designers are trying to make. Fabric sewed and folded into shapes that shift on the body like shadows. Colors that seem to come from the shaded, sun-dried underside of the spectrum. Clothes that reshape the body with the undulations of their fabric. Garments in which the space between the body and the cloth sets up a sliding, changing movement that is like an ever mutable silhouette. Fashion is meant to be a frivolous business, but consider: in no other area of culture and commerce has Asian style had such a direct impact on the West. The Japanese designers are playing by their own rules.

This may seem like heavy freight for mere fashion to bear, but Japanese designers do not usually make the fussy Western distinction between craft and art. Issey Miyake talks about the "energy" of fabric and works with a bolt of cloth like a sculptor with clay, not molding it into a presketched design but draping the whole length over a body, drawing the shape of the final garment from the fabric itself as it works in easy collaboration with the body. Rei Kawakubo, the most austere and cerebral of these new designers, speaks intensely about "getting down to the essence of shapelessness, formlessness and colorlessness." At first glance, her men's and women's clothes for Comme des Garc,ons (the name means "like the boys" and was chosen by Kawakubo for both its lilt and its casual defiance of traditional gender stereotypes) resemble items from a thrift shop at the far corner of Macbeth's blasted heath. Nonetheless, they have an ease that confounds traditional expectations of elegance.

Yohji Yamamoto, whose wondrously simple cascades of fabric combine Kawakubo's seriousness and Miyake's ebullience, may say that "fashion is fashion. In the end I think that fashion should not be an art." But he also expects his clothes to have the social impact of some major masterwork. "If you want to wear these," he says, "then you must change your situation!"

Yamamoto, 39, spent a little time in Paris during the late 1960s, absorbing European influences and watching the growing impact of his countryman Kenzo Takada, 43, on the insular enclave of French fashion. The whimsically heretical Kenzo and the silkenly elegant haute couturiere Hanae Mori, 57, were the first Japanese designers to have any visibility or impact outside their own country, and both had to leave home and establish bases of operation in Paris or New York City to do it. Japanese fashion was not a force then. It was really more like a curiosity, and Yamamoto returned to Tokyo to spend the next three years with his mother, a dressmaker, turning out "very formfitting, terrible clothes for women whose money came from their husbands or boyfriends." At about this same time, Kawakubo, 40, a former advertising coordinator and stylist, was working out her own first fashion forays, which were almost painfully conventional reworkings of European-style peasant dresses and glitzy knits.

It was Miyake, also around this period, who was making the greatest strides forward. Now 45, Miyake had served apprenticeships with Givenchy and Laroche in Paris and with Geoffrey Beene in New York. He had watched students storm through the streets of Paris in 1968 and seen their American contemporaries staging what Miyake calls "the jeans revolution." "I was always thinking," he says, "of how I could be original, and changing the length of dresses was not enough. I respect European tradition, but the Europeans do it better."

Returning to Tokyo in 1970, he set up his own company. His first fashion collection the following year was rooted in the transmogrified past. He used sashiko, an ancient form of quilted material traditionally meant for workers' clothing and judo uniforms. Miyake wove it wide, not narrow, and softened it so it yielded an unexpected, even sensuous, pliability.

"It was my denim," he says. In those early years, the shapes had their traditional roots as well. Miyake made a housecoat, called a tanzen, into a hooded wool coat and turned striped cloth used to lead horses on ceremonial occasions into a jersey. He made tucked cotton jumpsuits so intricate that he evoked origami, the ancient art of paper folding, and he turned a farmer's backpack into a knit jacket. Says he: "I was trying to peel away to the limit of fashion."

Every designer has to go through that same peeling process. Yamamoto and Kawakubo are in a sense just finishing up for themselves what Miyake passed through a few years before. Calling Miyake simply a forerunner is an almost careless understatement, like calling

Johnny Appleseed a dirt farmer. Miyake not only led the way but showed the direction as well. Today his direction remains bold and his technique consistent. "It is important for me not to take out the best part of the fabric by cutting a piece out of the middle, as a European would do." Instead of using old fabric, he has, for some time now, been making his own. Currently, he is working with a heavily textured stretch knit that looks like a lava flow, and is trying to decide what to do with an exotic combination of linen backed with Shetland wool that he has aptly dubbed "the I don't know" fabric.

Other directions, for all three designers, seem a little clearer. Kawakubo, who insists that "a jacket does not necessarily always have to have a back, any more than it has to have a shoulder line," will continue with her canny experimentation in regimented shapelessness, this year cutting and knotting her loose silhouettes into closer conformation with the wearer. Yamamoto will continue his excursions along the friendly edge of the outer limits. "A piece of paper has a surface and a back," he likes to say. "Other designers are doing the surface, and I am doing the back." Miyake is taking a direction that many Westerners will understand: a somewhat stricter shaping, although always within loose-limbed limits. "I had to do something different," he says. "I have been getting closer to the body."

The attention and attendant excitement around these three designers has buoyed the whole field of Japanese fashion. It may just be a trick of the limelight, but there seems to be bright talent everywhere. The gifted Mitsuhiro Matsuda, 49, makes clothes for his company, Nicole, that feature a kaleidoscopic collision of American influences: Annie Hall meets Mean Streets. Two of his contemporaries, Hiroko Koshino, 46, and Yukiko Hanai, 45, are showing a more European, high-fashion look. Younger designers like Shin Hosokawa, 33 (owner-designer of Pashu), and Yumiko Tamura, 28, and Tokio Kumagai, 35 (two of the major designers for Jun), are also showing keen interest and flair in appealing to the young, unmarried Japanese who still live at home with parents and whose salary checks do not yet have to support a family.

While the aesthetic influence of Yamamoto, Miyake and Kawakubo may be out of proportion to their earnings, there is still little reason to fret about their corporate coffers. Miyake's business now grosses $20 million a year; Yamamoto's newer company already grosses more than that; and Comme des Garc,ons, with sales growing at an average of 20% a year, is preparing to open its first American boutique in New York's fast and flashy SoHo district.

If Japanese fashion requires--indeed, demands--a kind of cerebral re-evaluation in prospect, in practice it does exactly what its designers preach. The clothes are easy to wear, eccentric only at their most extreme and flattering because they seem to relax around the wearer, not enveloping, containing or constraining the body, but rather exalting its freedom. At its best and at its essence, Japanese fashion not only holds on to the romance of the Asian past but extends a small promise of a shared future. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Sandra Burton/Tokyo

With reporting by Sandra Burton This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.