Y's first Paris boutique on Rue du Cygne. (Photo: an an Magazine, May 1 1981)

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Debut in Paris: Yohji Yamamoto (15)

Setting up shop in Le Marais to attract young people

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The aesthetics of wrinkles, earth tones, layered fashions.

One after another, Japanese fashion magazines would attach names to my style. Business at Y's, my ready-to-wear clothing maker, was expanding at a breakneck pace. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the company's annual sales reached between 3 billion to 5 billion yen, and the total number of employees, including clerks working at department stores, topped 100.

Our head office and warehouse was in Nishi-Azabu in Tokyo. There I had a white map of Japan hung above my desk, and whenever I found a business partner I would stick a red pin in it. Before I knew it, everywhere from Hokkaido to Okinawa was covered in red and there were no more white areas.

Since I had conquered most of the country, I thought, "OK, then, let's set up shop in Paris."

For this simple reason, I set up a store in the French capital in 1981. I had no great ambitions. It was a very nonchalant thought. I was just hoping to put up a small store and find a few people who liked my clothes.

At the time, Japanese fashion designers like Kenzo Takada, Issey Miyake and Kansai Yamamoto were very active overseas. I had always prioritized the Japanese market, so I may have lagged behind them in terms of expanding abroad.

Honestly, however, I was not in a rush. I just had the offhand thought that it was about time for me to move overseas. I never thought that I could become a mainstream trendsetter, since I was an "anti-mode" designer who had originally ignored trends.

There was a young employee at the company named Atsuro Tayama. He joined Y's after graduating from Bunka Fashion College in 1975. He was my right-hand man in making clothes, and he supported me in the early days of the company. He was not only blessed with a keen sense for selecting fabrics but also had the guts to do door-to-door marketing. I decided to send him to Paris before setting up a store there.

Because Y's was considered avant-garde, he decided it would be better to open a shop in Le Marais, where young people would gather, rather than in a district with many luxury brands, like Rue Saint-Honoré.

Tayama went around to many realtors and found a good place on the Rue du Cygne, near the Forum des Halles. He began preparing to open a store and we set up a local subsidiary.

However, a problem came up with the brand name. Y's, which I chose from the first letter of my family name, Yamamoto, was too simple to be permitted as a brand name and could not be registered as a trademark under French law. Moreover, there was a risk that it might be confused with the logo of French luxury brand Yves Saint Laurent, which is a combination of the letters Y, S and L.

I was partial to Y's, but had no choice but to register the brand as the full name, "Yohji Yamamoto." The store opened in April 1981, and all of the products were exported from Japan.

Our arrival in Paris was a great opportunity, so we decided to hold a floor show as well. For my part, I wanted Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons to go together to Paris at around the same time. Since Y's and Comme des Garçons were both considered avant-garde, I thought it would be more effective to collaborate for our debut in Paris, just as we had done in Japan.

But I did not know what Kawakubo's intentions were. She may have been thinking it was too early to make her debut in Paris.

In any event, I decided to move ahead alone. I followed the advance team and began to prepare the store and show. I never dreamed that our Paris debut would later become a major event that would shake the entire world of fashion.