How Yohji Yamamoto Brought Poetry and Warmth to His Arctic-Inspired Collection for Fall 2000
We’ve shaken the Vogue Runway archive like a snow globe. When the glistening flakes settled, the very best winter wonderland shows were revealed. We’re sharing them, one by one, over eight days. Day 2: Yohji Yamamoto’s Fall 2000 collection, presented on February 27, 2000, in Paris.
Presented to the soothing rhythm of chanting, this poetic collection, wrote Hamish Bowles, was about “luxurious cocooning” and the “sensuous pleasures of wrapping up against the cold.” Make that an Arctic chill. Yohji Yamamoto, a designer preoccupied, explained an associate, with the “nomad dimension of people,” studied traditional Eskimo dress and textile traditions for this collection. Their ways of “draping skins on the body,” Yamamoto told Vogue, were of particular interest to him. In the designer’s world, layering takes on multiple dimensions. To begin with, he’s a Japanese designer showing in the West mixing different traditions. For Fall 2000, his focus was largely on voluminous silhouettes with full skirts that swung gently from the waist in vaguely Victorian proportions, an era he also seemed to summon by his use of paisley. Those woven fabrics and duvet-stuffed garments spoke of interiors. “Clothing as habitat, poetic igloo,” was apparently one of Yamamoto’s concepts. The other was “elegance in its raw state.” It was these looks that most excited the editors at Vogue; several pieces from the show ended up in a magazine portfolio about “a high-concept remix of the rough and refined.”
Winter Wonderland
To understand the impact of this collection, it helps to put it in context of the prevailing trends of the time, which were summarized by Sally Singer in the magazine. “Much has been made about the retro mood of current fashion,” she wrote, “but what has often been overlooked is the particular nature of the retrospection. Designers are going through a iconolatrous phase with homages to Deneuve and Jackie O and Princess Grace two a penny. It’s tasteful and classic and safe as bricks. The choice of all these well-known, commercially mainstream personages reflects the essentially bourgeois tenor of the times.” Yamamoto, a musician as well as a designer, stood apart from those bourgeois winds, though he paid tribute to family values with his holy trinity of a finale.
