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.

This jacket hails from Yohji’s fruitful collaboration with Italian motorsport wear label Dainese, in which he borrowed traditional iterations of their motorcycle jackets, and did them up with logos and iconography of his own conjuring. This piece reiterates Dainese’s classic “V” shaped logo, but introduces ”YOHJI” branding on the sleeve, and a cartoon avatar with “MOTO yohji” to pair.

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws.

Tagged size: 40

Shoulder: 15.5in

Pit to pit: 17in

Length: 19in

Sleeve: 23in