Style Out of Life

By JAY COCKS

NEW FASHION JAPAN by Leonard Koren Kodansha; 176 pages; $19.95

It may be that the latest major movement of national popular culture to have international impact--like the French new wave in films or the British invasion of American rock music--is clothing from Japan. Fashion has generally been tied to society, to frivolity, to pricey artifice in the service of camp and commerce. It is a subject that seldom rates serious attention. There are not, after all, a lot of clothing designers who deserve it. But of those who do, a disproportionate number are Japanese. If someone as gifted as Issey Miyake were making movies, he would already be hailed as a world master, with grand prizes and retrospectives. As it is, however, honor in this chosen field is mostly a matter of a new boutique opening and bare shelves before the season ends.

Miyake is the luckiest of his peers; he is also the most insistent on the aesthetic worth and quality of his work. For years he has received international recognition; recently he has been accorded museum shows in Europe and the U.S. Other Japanese designers will get their first official portion of Western respect from New Fashion Japan, a fast, smart and wholly seductive volume. Leonard Keren's sleek text is augmented with graphics that convey the essence of contemporary Japanese clothing design, plus a suggestion of its enterprise and a taste of its excitement.

Short photo essays concentrate on seven designers, among them Miyake, the ebulliently inventive Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo, whose designs demonstrate what Koren calls "irony, image juxtaposition and whimsy . . . the purest, most uncompromising and strongest avant-garde vision." The book also includes chapters of careful observation on history and tradition, fabric design, graphic display and body structure (illustrated with vintage photos of women who dive for fish outside a village east of Tokyo). "I make style out of life," Miyake says, "not style out of style." The roots of that life are beautifully revealed in a series of candid photos put together almost like a jump-cut documentary on Tokyo street life, showing everyone from a roadworker wearing rubberized rain gear to a peddler, a Buddhist monk and a junk collector.

Koren is untroubled by the customary Western distinctions between art and handicraft. "In the dreamlike language of fashion," he believes, "a people are communicating the current ideals, values and aspirations of their culture." That idea may be refuted; it may be bought wholesale, on time or at closeout; but the best place to window-shop while thinking it over is this shrewd and knowing introduction to a closet revolution.

--By Jay Cocks