To level accolades upon Yohji is like, as Leonard Cohen once said about Bob Dylan, “pinning a metal on Mount Everest”. He claims himself to not be an artist, he says fashion has never been an art, yet to deny the artistic quality of his work would be to deny what our eyes can plainly observe. Like an impressionist painter, he exhumes the depth of relatively simple garments (dirty clothes, the Japanese press branded his early work), taking a form and rendering its function secondary to the emotion he choses to evoke. He refuses to do all the work for you, where a passerby sees a wrinkled coat and oversized, strangely buttoned shirt, a man willing to consider the rorschach presented to him may see anything from romanticism to suffering. This foundational concession — that there is no answer to what precisely you’re looking at — has rendered Yohji a favorite of artists and thinkers across the world.

Within the vast cannon of Yohji’s work, flowers have remained a mini-motif across the decades. Counter intuitive to the typical presumption of Yohji’s runways being defined by the morose, his SS1996 “Flowers and Boyhood” was rife with floral visuals, as was the collection these pants originated from. He produced matching all-over print floral shirts and suiting. They are cut with a wide leg, and feature the collection’s trademark wrinkled cotton fabric.

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws.

Tagged size: 3

Waist: 18in

Rise: 14in

Thigh: 14.5in

Inseam: 31.5in

Hem: 9.75in