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. 

The back of this heavy-weight horse leather jacket features art from Justin Davis, an American jeweler. With sensibilities formed in the heart of Los Angele's 70s/80s rock scene, a sleazy melting pot of outcasts and up-and-comers immortalized in hair metal anthems like “Girls, Girls, Girls” and “Welcome to the Jungle”, his work borrows heavily from both gothic and biker culture, and has made him popular with a litany of rockstars and actors. This graphic is a bold reinterpretation of WWII American Naval Tattoo-style insignia (fittingly also channeled by the biker gangs of Davis's era), updated for America's modern war conflicts. The jacket employs a highly unique distressing technique, which creates natural inconsistencies throughout the red body. 

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws. Distressing is intentional.

Tagged size: 2

Shoulder: 18.25in

Pit to pit: 21.5in

Length: 26in

Sleeve: 25.5in