Bakhtu Barnsley
Yamamoto, Comme and the absent 90s (part 2)
It’s winter 2004 and I’ve just made a life-changing decision to buy a Yohji Yamamoto blazer at the Pollyanna (Barnsley) sale. This section of the essay backtracks on how Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons found their way into British fashion and style culture in the mid-80s.
Yohji Yamamoto was born in 1943 and entered into the Tokyo fashion world in 1977. In 1981 he broke onto the high-end fashion scene with fellow Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, launching a pincer assault to shake up the Parisian stronghold and instigate a slow rippling effect as the post-punk 1980s fashion landscape reconfigured itself and infiltrated the high-end market.
Both designers shared a common background and set of defining themes that were at the time antithetical to the Parisian high-end fashion system – the clothes embodied and signalled neediness, meagreness, destitution, hardship and an anti-consumptive prompting, whilst provoking responses of disarray and confusion. Seemingly oblivious to the pre-set of frenetic dandyism, Yamamoto and Comme worked from a meticulously (re)considered punk and post-punk sensibility and blueprint to counterpoise the staid and contrived high drama and signalled ostentation of Parisian fashion.
For Yamamoto, two reference points prove useful as he works towards inscribing a European fashion history into his work: firstly, the photographer/ethnographer August Sander who compiled his People of the 20th Century in the early 1920s, photographing all contrasting types and classes of people that capture both the clothes worn and (more importantly) how the subjects dwell in their clothes; and secondly, the radical Arte Povera movement of 1960s Italy that used raw materials from deliberately found and basic sources to construct paintings and 3-d sculptures.
I would also add a note towards Mary Kelly’s An Earthwork Performed (1970) as re-imagined in the spellbinding exhibition A Lesson in Sculpture from John Latham presented at the Henry Moore Institute in 2016. This was in Leeds, not far from Barnsley, and there was a ‘Povera’ blackness throughout with burnt book sculptures, torched minimalist cubes and piles of coal from Kelly and Marcel Broodthaers. It was one of those exhibitions that gripped me, and my thinking returns to it time and again. It wasn’t the obvious link of Yamamoto with the gallery-goggling arty farty set, more so the rawness of material and a kind of raw beauty of black cloth fabric.
This pursuit of a historical context is neither the (experimental) revisionist historicism of Vivienne Westwood (covered in an earlier sequence of SUB>SUMED essays) nor the pick-and-mix historical sampling of postmodernism. As fashion theorist Barbara Vinken argues, Yamamoto exemplifies a true post-fashion that re-modernises postmodern elements. To emphasise this, Yamamoto pursued asymmetric and looser fitting jacketing with lower hanging buttons, employing the faux vieux (already used) aesthetic, an assault on the self-aware and self-confident 1980s fashion silhouette. Looking back on it now, it has a yearning connection to post-punk styling, and it seems only inevitable that restless fashionistas from the post-punk fragments would soon start investigating.
If Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened a bridge over to Paris with their inclusion in shows from A/W 1982 collections onwards, then the independent and underground British fashion media who had supported the punk design duo were in turn exposed to Comme and Yamamoto who were also commencing their uprooting of the Parisian harmony. They took back the news of this renegade spirit which linked to the British subcultural streetstyle and upstart tradition – then still the pulse of the DIY style magazines. In an early 1983 issue of i-D (#11) the fledgling designer Elaine Oxford references Yamamoto and “Comme les Garcons” as an influence.
Comme and Yamamoto have short features in The Face for both April and June 1983, a November 1984 feature in Blitz, and a fuller dedicated feature in i-D for August 1986 (part of a ‘Japanese Whispers’ feature) and a slightly later inclusion in The Face for March 1987 advertising the same collection. With an early exclusive design credit on the pop-industrialist outfit SPK’s breakthrough album Machine Age Voodoo in 1985, popstars started to pick up on the Comme name. Avid Westwood fan Pete Burns (of the band Dead or Alive) is featured wearing the moth-eaten look in an out-of-character fashion spread for Record Mirror in October 1983.
It is part of the move from the anarchic panache of streetstyle to a prescriptive bifurcating path around luxury labels and streetwear. Next up we have ex-Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey adopting Comme as part of his new image for a December 1984 feature in The Face. By 1984 Yamamoto’s distinctive clothing was being incorporated into fashion shoots for the trio of Blitz and The Face, and by 1986 Blitz ran a full feature on the designer and The Face ran a full-page advertisement in their November issue. This coincided with Nick Knight producing a typically ground-breaking photo-shoot for the Yamamoto catalogue.
Not to be outdone, Comme incorporated a double-page advertisement in the September 1986 issue of The Face, using a doubled shot of ex-Skids frontman and all-round fashionista Richard Jobson wearing that typical early-Comme style of a loose fit and ruched internal detailing. By the way, that’s the same Richard Jobson who we last saw at the start of this adventure, proudly displaying his “Skid trousers” on the cover of their 1979 single.
Comme followed this in March 1987 with an iconic double-page advertisement with a stunning hauntological New Romantic tangent, as six young men stare at the camera from within an intimate bundle of shared slicked hairstyles and fine suiting. Even though it is Yamamoto who cites August Sander as an influence, there's a funny resemblance between this Comme ad and Sander's famous 1914 photo Young Farmers, also known as Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance. Now doubled up to Six Farmers on their Way to a Spandau Ballet/Simple Minds Gig.
As the balance in UK fashion shifted from home-grown street designers who had burnt bright and briefly in the new romantic era to names starting to establish a wider reputation on the world fashion stage, the Japanese pair of Yamamoto and Comme are integrated into the dynamic of the UK scene. The post-punk fashionista audience who were bitten by the frenzied dressing up bug of the early 1980s new romantic culture start to mature, and turn to the Japanese designers as an immediate choice that signals style, moderate subversion and exclusiveness. It’s like a continuation of the new romantic elements, but toned down for a matured generation. Suits, as discussed in my lengthy Heaven 17 feature in the previous long essay, had flourished in diverse fashions in the post-punk era, though mainly as either a retro version (art-rock dead man suits, zoots) or as some kind of fantasy dressing up (Heaven 17’s boardroom mimicking, Duran Duran’s glib excess).
The important shop Browns had supported and stocked the labels from the early 1980s, with Comme having a dedicated space entered through a semi-hidden door in 1983. It’s like high-end punk clothing shopping without the risk of being chased by skinheads or Teds. Yamamoto has a presence in London by 1984, with i-D running a feature in their September issue on the desirability of their store bags!
It was an 80s niche that passed me by. I’d taken my eyes off the fashion press by the end of the decade as we approached the dreaded vanishing point of the 90s (see next post). I think, even if I was still scrutinising the style magazines, it wouldn’t have been something that grabbed my attention. It was glimpsed in the background amidst the other styles more rooted in a ‘street’ vernacular that were emerging in the proto-house music era (MA-1 jackets, DMs, army surplus).
By the time of my visit to Pollyanna in 2004 both Comme and Yamamoto were well established in the UK with their own retail franchises in London offering a distinct but mutual pole to the onset of the Antwerp designers such as Raf Simons and Martin Margiela. Yamamoto is described as “a paragon of poetic radicalism”. It certainly wouldn’t be how I’d describe myself at that moment that I wandered into this strange shop on a flyblown Sunday afternoon in South Yorkshire.