Finale at Yohji Yamamoto Spring / Summer 1982, Denen Coliseum, Tokyo

"Mode japonais" generates big boom back home: Yohji Yamamoto (17)

The moment when black avant-garde took over the fashion industry

What is an ideal woman?

Imagine a woman with a skirt gently blown up by a breeze. She is wearing what appears to be a tailored jacket, loosely hanging on her shoulders, with a thick cigar in her mouth. With her hair, clothes and the smoke swaying in the breeze, she mutters wearily:

"You know what, I quit being a woman."

An independent woman who does not suck up to anyone appears ready to reject even men's stares. This is an imaginary persona, but such a woman is cool and endearing to me. This is the basic image I have when designing clothes.

I have always had a longing for loosefitting clothes like work garments, rather than those that tightly fit the body. Garments that create space to let air inside allow the cloth to move beautifully.

The reason I prefer black is that it does not allow you to disguise. It naturally leads the attention of both people who wear the clothes and those who look at them to the beauty of the shape and the movement of the material, without confusing them with flashy colors.

My Y's and Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons are both categorized as avant-garde, but our relationship might be like the head and tail of a coin.

The biggest difference is that with Y's, I, the designer, am a man while Kawakubo is a woman. I design clothes to make women "stylish" from a man's perspective. By contrast, Kawakubo designs clothes from a woman's perspective.

Our approaches to designing also differ.

I learned basic skills like sewing, cutting and pattern making at Bunka Fashion College and practiced them at my mother's shop. Kawakubo started out her career at a Japanese textile company and became a freelance fashion stylist afterward. She did not receive formal training in fashion design and dressmaking.

And that is why Kawakubo's work is freer, more determined and more daring than mine. She is so bold I am tempted to take off a hat and say, "OK, you win!" By contrast, my ideas tend to remain within the bounds developed through my experience as a professional dressmaker.

This difference in perspective inspires each of us, challenges and stimulates us. We both have created new ideas and approaches and then destroyed them in a repeated cycle of avant-garde experimentation.

After the "Shock of Black," Y's and Comme des Garçons were said to have changed the face of the fashion world overnight. Brought up in Kabukicho district in the middle of cosmopolitan Tokyo, I have little awareness of being Japanese, so when they started calling us "la mode japonaise," I had no idea what to make of it.

Reactions varied: fear, displeasure, admiration. But the shock wave spread beyond my expectations. Each time we had a show or exhibition, the venue was jampacked with buyers and journalists. An old elevator at our Paris office malfunctioned and stopped working.

The first buyer to have a contract with us was Charivari, a U.S. fashion retailer. It bought our products in massive quantities and filled half the space of a new New York store with my clothes. A show we ran in New York (AW82) was well received, and the "Shock of Black" spread to the rest of the world.

The craze was repatriated to Japan and fueled what was known as the "DC boom," where "DC" fashion items, those which prominently feature designer names or company brands, were enthusiastically embraced by young Japanese. Many readers in Japan might remember seeing the "crows," young people with sides of their head closely shaved and wearing entirely black clothes, on city streets across the country.

When an outdoor show was held at the Denen Coliseum, a tennis stadium in Tokyo (closed in 1989), on the evening of Nov. 13, 1981, I was astonished at the size of the crowd.

"No way!" I said to myself. "This must be a joke."

The event, a show that was originally held in Paris and brought to Tokyo as it was, attracted, to my surprise, about 8,000 visitors. A very long line of people that started at the venue reached the nearest train station.

"Wow, this is incredible! I can't believe you could attract such a huge crowd with a fashion event," theater director Yukio Ninagawa, who bothered to come to see the show, said with a serious face.