Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum presents one of the most influential and enigmatic fashion designers of the last forty years, Yohji Yamamoto. Yamamoto is a visionary designer who has made a vital contribution to fashion, challenging traditional norms of clothing with his avant-garde style. This is his first major solo show in the UK and is an installation-based retrospective showcasing over 80 women's and menswear garments, which are most representative of his work.

The Exhibition

This exhibition explores the work of idiosyncratic and ground-breaking designer Yohji Yamamoto. Fabric, he said, 'is everything'. This deep interest in textiles is at the heart of his approach to design.

Yamamoto became internationally renowned in the early eighties for challenging traditional notions of fashion by designing garments that seemed oversized, unfinished, played with ideas of gender or fabrics not normally used in fashionable attire such as felt or neoprene. Other works revealed Yamamoto's unusual pattern cutting, knowledge of fashion history and sense of humour. His work is characterised by a frequent and skilful use of black, a colour which he describes as 'modest and arrogant at the same time'.

Main Exhibition Space

The core of the exhibition, which is conceived as a series of installations throughout the museum, is located in one of the V&A’s temporary exhibition courts. Looking back at a career spanning almost 40 years, this space highlights some of the main features of Yamamoto’s work.

Central to Yohji Yamamoto’s work are the textiles. ‘Fabric’ he said once ‘is everything’. Each one of the fabrics used in his collections are made to his specifications by different craftspeople in and around Kyoto in Japan. This important aspect of Yamamoto’s design process is key to why all of the garments on show are on open display. Visitors are invited to walk amongst them and inspect the intricacies of the fabrics up close. Some of the mannequins are arranged in groups that act as subtle pointers to a certain theme in Yamamoto’s work such as layering or androgyny.

As well as featuring Yamamoto’s designs, the main exhibition space features a mixed-media timeline showing a mixture of excerpts from his fashion shows, films and performances, graphic material and select photographs which help contextualise his wider creative output. Over the years Yamamoto has also worked with a number of collaborators in different fields. In particular his work with now famous fashion photographers such as Nick Knight, Paolo Roversi and Craig McDean has resulted in now often iconic fashion imagery. Some of the catalogues that feature these have images have been reproduced in collaboration with our imaging partner Canon UK Ltd for visitors to look through and see the images, but also appreciate the art direction and graphic design.