Japanese Fashion as Design Philosophy: Five Ideas Under the Clothes
Writers on Japanese fashion often reach for a single word: wabi-sabi, ma, kawaii. The habit is understandable and mostly wrong, because no single word explains designers as unlike as Issey Miyake and Nigo. What the best of them share is a way of working that treats clothing as a problem of design, not of decoration. This essay sets out five ideas that recur in the clothes and in what the designers have said. They are readings, not rules; no designer subscribes to a manifesto.
The space between
The Metropolitan Museum titled its 2017 Kawakubo exhibition Art of the In-Between, and the phrase fits the generation. Yohji Yamamoto’s clothes stand away from the body; Miyake’s pleats hold air; Kawakubo’s padded forms of spring/summer 1997 turn the gap between body and dress into the subject. Japanese aesthetics has a long vocabulary for interval and pause, and it is natural to read it into the clothes, but the more precise claim is that the Paris generation designed the distance between body and cloth, which Western tailoring had tried to close.
The shadow
Yamamoto’s remark that black is modest and arrogant at the same time belongs with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, which argued in the 1930s that Japanese beauty lives in dimness. Black in 1981 shocked Paris, where critics reached for the language of mourning and catastrophe. The Japanese black is also a texture, each cloth absorbing light differently. The story of Yamamoto is in The Discipline of Silence.
The made thing
The Japanese word monozukuri, the making of things, and the figure of the shokunin, the artisan who perfects one craft, run through the story from the kimono workshop to the Kojima denim mill. Miyake’s pleating process, Kapital’s sashiko stitching and visvim’s elk-leather moccasins are all expressions of the same priority. The idea is explored on its own in What Is Japanese Craft Philosophy?
The copy as devotion
In much of the West, imitation is the lowest form of design. In Japan, careful reproduction can be a form of respect: the makers of Osaka and Okayama studied American jeans, flight jackets and Ivy blazers until they could reproduce them stitch for stitch, and they treated the exercise as an apprenticeship. That is the logic of amekaji, told in The History of Amekaji, and it is why collectors prize Japanese reproductions in their own right.
The hybrid
The last idea is the most recent. Chitose Abe’s Sacai joins two garments in one, a method she describes as hybridisation. The hybrid is an old Japanese habit, visible in the kimono remake that turns obi brocade into a jacket and the wagara pattern printed on a camp-collar shirt. It declines to choose between tradition and the new, and asks the wearer to hold both. See Sacai and Junya Watanabe.
A caution
These ideas are useful and also dangerous. They make good captions, and they have been used so often that they now stand in for knowledge. The corrective is the plain chronology, which is in the Encyclopedia: when Miyake showed in Paris, when Kawakubo debuted, when Undercover began. A philosophy that cannot survive a date is not worth quoting.
Why Japan
The ideas above are visible only in the objects. Japan’s habit of keeping garments in good order, in their bags and with their tags, is the reason the evidence has survived.
In the archive now
Continue reading
- Issey Miyake: Clothing as Architecture
- Rei Kawakubo: Against Clothing
- visvim: Return to Sacred Making
- The Fashionista Bible · Japonista Universe
Looking for a landmark piece? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan’s private collector circles on your behalf.
Index terms: japanese fashion philosophy · japanese design philosophy · ma space between · in praise of shadows · monozukuri · shokunin · hybrid garments · japanese avant-garde