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 and explores 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. To this day there remains a "diamond in the rough" quality to his work. He refuses to do all the work for you, where a lazy man 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 refusal to fully answer what exactly you’re looking at has rendered Yohji a favorite of artists and thinkers across the world. 

Yohji’s spring ’02 collection was littered with prints which spoke to Yohji’s mischievous side - a quality which has always simmered beneath the maudlin runway aesthetic he is known for. Yohji has seemingly never held himself to the same standard of gravitas, oft denying that he is an “artist” in the sense of a great musician or painter, and appearing uncommonly candid and cheeky in interviews throughout his career. When pressed on what further creative endeavors he’d like to pursue, he mused to i-D magazine that he would like to direct porn. The psychedelic visuals of girls, flowers, and even sexualized pigs came from Saeko Tsuemura, a renowned Japanese brush artist who granted Yohji access to her archive shortly before passing away.

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws.

Tagged size: 3

Shoulder: 18.5in

Pit to pit: 22.5in

Length: 29.5in

Sleeve: 26.5in