Inside Paris’ Salons de l’Hotel De Ville, Japanese craftsman Yohji Yamamoto delivered a Spring 2025 collection that was beautifully tethered, manipulated, reconstructed and layered — all in pursuit of summoning his muse’s inner child. “Broken outfits,” the designer called his creations, for their pulled-apart and patched-together constructions, each of which was meticulously built, despite their apparent haphazardness. To an arrangement on Bach, Gluck, Ravel, Japanese tiles and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” played by pianist Pavel Koesnikov, Yamamoto’s latest fashion manifesto—a blend of traditional Japanese tailoring and contemporary cutting-room ploys— met Paris Fashion Week’s glitterati.
Asymmetrical black dresses boasted sheer finishes and locked eyes with glaring red string; maroon iterations kept showgoers’ attention with intricate cut-out details and lace bodices, and more gowns appeared like unfinished jigsaw puzzles, with textile slabs sporadically placed all across the body. Here, Yamamoto gleefully let go of any fashion “laws,” mixing knotted yarns, silky materials, cotton slabs and numbered prints together in singular ensembles, almost as if he sourced the best pieces from his cutting room floor and turned them into works of art. The chaotic results were and quite moody, operating on an almost entirely dark color palette.
However, the final few pieces—flowing dresses and sleeveless blazers among them—beamed in true red. W.
