The Unfinished Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto keeps his eyes on the future. One of contemporary fashion’s great constants, Yamamoto has deep wisdom and perspective. Indeed, he just turned 83 in October, but at the same time, his eyes glitter with the cheekiness of a rogue teenager. Fashion is fickle, chewing up and spitting out designers at speed, but he has unwaveringly endured — an MVP for the ages. Everybody loves Yohji.

Known for his steady and poetic speech, Yohji-san (as he is referred to reverently by his staff and those who know him) has a talent for choosing his words in English with razor-sharp precision. Not for nothing, he is one of fashion’s most quotable designers for his thoughts on everything from the color black (“Black is arrogant and modest at the same time”) to beauty (“I think perfection is ugly”) to the creative process itself (“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself”). His satisfying one-liners and pearls of wisdom are enough to fill a book. When Yohji-san speaks, the fashion industry — and the creative world at large — listens.

Interviews with Yamamoto are infrequent at best and he is fiercely protected by his staff. Dressed in the brand’s signature black, they are the shadowy soldiers that stand between the designer and the outside world. They travel between Paris and Tokyo four times a year for the designer’s menswear and womenswear shows, a darkly-clad envoy with Yamamoto at the center — no photos at the airport, please. Nevertheless, during preparation for his Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear show, he agreed to answer a few questions for Hypebeast.

Reliably dressed in layers of black tailoring, often gabardine, Yamamoto’s outfits always look soft and lived-in, meticulous but relaxed. “I don’t overthink what I wear,” he explains when asked about his own clothes. “But fabrics are most important.” His trusty Borsalino fedora that he has worn for decades is a constant — like the Hi-Lite cigarettes he smokes — though it’s been part of his look for so long that he doesn’t remember when he began wearing it. He simply states, “It is part of me.”

For nearly 50 years, after his always-packed shows, Yohji-san has emerged from backstage, in his signature hat, beaming into the audience and blinking into the runway lights. With crinkled eyes, he gracefully takes his bow, waving both hands in gratitude for all those who attend. Indeed, these end-of-show bows have become fashion moments in their own right. But has that energy changed with the passage of time? “Always the same feeling,” he says. “I would say pressure is even stronger over the years, maybe because I am increasingly aware of the challenge. I don’t want to repeat myself. I’m always looking for new ideas, new ways of expressing them.”

The quandary that plagues all fashion designers — that they must stay focused on what comes next while also building on what has come before — is particularly tough for Yamamoto, who has one of fashion’s most instantly recognizable visual languages. Still, he pushes forward. His Autumn/Winter 2025 menswear collection, for instance, experimented with textured down jackets in an attempt to make them look elegant as well as practical. One shirt in the collection even bore the phrase, “I’m trying to create something that does not exist in the world.” Though black, drapey tailoring is his bread and butter, there is seemingly nothing he cannot put his spin on; a slow but steady expansion of his universe.

“Basically, I start every collection from zero, trying to have a fresh and new start,” he explains. Any references to his previous work or collections, he adds, are never on purpose. “It may come naturally, unconsciously… As I am the same person over the years, so I guess my whole [body of] work is in my mind.” But how does a designer with over 50 years’ experience go back to zero? For Yamamoto, it’s about staying curious. “It is often a question I have been asking myself that I return to, approaching it differently and proposing another answer to a question.” These questions, he explains, often lie in the mundanity of everyday life. “The first thing I am thinking of is the person who will wear the clothes, what he or she is like, where she lives, what is their life,” he says. “Naturally, all of them are my inspiration but expressed in different ways. They are different methods to confront the world and to live.”

His latest menswear collection, for Spring/Summer 2027, was a characteristic example of this curiosity, but it felt even more poignant than usual. Featuring marbled monochrome prints that were smudged across long tailoring and floaty knitwear, he also explored the structure of shoulders and sleeves through oversized, architectural silhouettes.

Yamamoto’s longtime jewelry designer Rui Harui, closed the show, wearing a black eye mask and a long black dress with a chain across her body that she spun slowly in her hands. As Harui walked the runway, Yamamoto’s tender cover of James Taylor’s 1971 classic “You Can Close Your Eyes” played over the speakers. “You can close your eyes, it’s alright. I don’t know no love songs, and I can’t sing the blues anymore,” he sang softly. “But I can sing this song. And you can sing this song, when I’m gone.”

Had Yamamoto been thinking about the end? Whatever had been going through the designer’s mind, it’s no surprise that he chose to express it through music. A lifelong music lover — his favorites are Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis — Yohji-san would have made a great rockstar if he hadn’t become a fashion designer. He has too many guitars to count, he says, and keeps them both in Tokyo and at his residence in Paris. His favorite is a Gibson, which he has been using to record the soundtracks for his recent shows. Characteristically melancholy, his recordings serve as poetic extensions of the clothes on the runway. “They are interconnected. It is a feeling, an emotion, that is like a wave going through all the clothes,” he says.

When his hands are not on the guitar, they are holding a pen. Sketches are a large part of his process, sometimes even appearing in scrawls on the side of a skirt, or on the back of a long coat. So prolific has he been in his sketching that they have now been compiled into a book of sketches, called Yohji Yamamoto Drawings, to be published by Thames & Hudson this November. “[Sketching] is easier than words,” he says. “They are ways to work through ideas, hypothesize and visualize something before making it into fabric. I sketch all the time — in and out of my head.”

First taught to sew by his war-widowed mother, who worked as a dressmaker in Kabukicho, Yamamoto has long been known as a master tailor. His practice may exist in a framework of fashion convention, but his garments curve or drape in ways that are often more akin to paintings, so fluid or asymmetrical that when worn on the body, their appearance flickers between the sensual and the sombre. “I would say that I have no rules. I understand the architecture for forms, but having a preexisting rule limits you,” he says. “The way I think about my work and the clothes I make very often break formal rules… questioning set formulas like symmetry, so-called balance.”

Back in 1981, when Yohji Yamamoto first made his Paris debut at his tiny, newly-opened boutique on Rue du Cygne, his dark and moody clothing signaled a sea change in fashion. Asymmetric, slouchy, and all-black, his clothes redefined the Western ideal of beauty and style, wrenching it away from the pretty colors and form-flattering shapes of the mid-20th century into something much more cerebral — clothes for people dressing for themselves rather than for others. Tempting as it is to dig into the designer’s background, retrospection is futile: for Yohji, there is no yesterday. “I honestly don’t remember what I did in the past… It is not a pose, it is true!” he says. “It is always what is ahead that energizes me.”

Eyes forward, then. What does he think about his younger peers in fashion? “To be honest, I am very worried about the next generation of fashion designers,” he admits. “They have to confront a very difficult situation: how can you create freely, how can you make new things in the world as it is, with all its wars and dangers, and with a fashion industry that is destroying creativity with huge economic pressure on the designers? The world is in distress and creativity is suffering. You cannot create anything new or exciting in these conditions.” His advice is comforting in its simplicity: “Work is the key. You have to work hard,” he says. “As I once said, it is a kind of sacrifice. This is the price to pay to make anything: you need to work, work, work.” Whether through sketching, through music, or through design, work is what keeps him going.

Despite his resoluteness at looking to the future, there is a wistfulness to how Yamamoto feels about his own place in the industry. His clothes are often described as avant-garde, and his tailoring is known for being “revolutionary” or “experimental.” But after five decades, there are few others who have been able to move fashion’s needle forward in the same way.

The designer’s four annual shows in Paris have remained hot tickets for decades, drawing fans from strikingly different corners of culture. His influence on the designers who followed is just as durable: In a 2019 System magazine article, the publication went so far as to claim that without Yamamoto, there would have been no 1990s deconstruction or Belgian conceptualism — the mode that gave us the Antwerp Six. Today, his clothes turn up on everyone from NFL players, Gen Z rappers, iconic directors like Wim Wenders or Takeshi Kitano, and even elegant pensioners — wide-ranging communities of Yohji devotees the world over.

And though his designs move with the times, his clothes largely resist trends; never focused on looking too pretty, they read more as tangible extensions of human emotion — or get as close to it as clothes can. In the age of AI, this feels especially appealing. What other living person in fashion — let alone still designing under their own name — has the kind of aura that can bridge such vast cultural gaps? One more time: Everybody loves Yohji-san.

Yamamoto’s impact means he has spent the latter part of his career largely without true peers. “Unfortunately, my main ‘competitors’ and friends are no more in this world,” he says. “I admire them so much: Azzedine Alaïa, Giorgio Armani, Alexander McQueen… so, I feel a bit lonely.” With almost all of the names that once operated in Yohji’s realm of high fashion now gone, he is unironically the last man standing, the air getting thinner all the time. “It may be that I miss competition, but most of all I miss them,” he says. “That is why I keep a creative conversation with them through their work that I pay homage to in my collections.”

Legacy, however, is no cure for loneliness. Yamamoto has experienced the success and glamor of the fashion industry from its loftiest heights, and also tasted his share of failure and heartbreak, including a famous court-supervised restructuring that nearly cost him his business in 2009. In the here and now, however, he occupies a stable position in fashion’s pantheon, and his place in the history books is assured.

Through the trials he’s faced over the past five decades, I wonder if Yamamoto has become more or less patient. “Both I would say. In a way more patient, as I try to accept and understand the situation before getting impatient… and in a way more impatient as I would love everything to happen at once,” he says. “I don’t really have a quiet relationship with time.” His favorite part of the day is the early morning, when he’ll take his dogs for a walk before work begins. “It is a moment to myself, and with them, when I get to reflect on what is ahead,” he says.

Maybe what makes Yohji-san’s popularity so enduring transcends his oeuvre. Maybe it’s his dogged determination to keep moving forward, those twinkling eyes always fixed on tomorrow. There’s a sense that his work is forever asking, asking, asking. “Clothes are a set of questions we ask ourselves about being human,” he says. “And I guess I am still looking for the answers.”