Last year Dr Gene Sherman (Director of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation) donated a 62-piece collection of her own clothing and accessories by Japanese designers – primarily Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto – to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. Until March 14 a small selection of the archive is on display at the Lake Macquarie Arts Centre, showing simultaneously with the Powerhouse Museum’s FRUiTS! Tokyo Street Style exhibition. The text below is taken from the catalogue essay written by me.
“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows)
Japan has always been poised to show the rest of the world the allure of shadows and blackness; to remind us that as stars cannot be seen in the day, it is darkness that gives form to light. Just as the excessively golden and ornate age of Rococo gave way to the European infatuation with the understated blackness of Japanese shikki (lacquerware), the bright colours and showy glamour of fashion in the West in the mid 1980s was shaken up by the sombre, achromatic pallet for which Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yōji Yamamoto first became famous.
They proposed a radically new (but also, as I will suggest here, age-old) aesthetic that emphasised form, line, texture and tactility over colour; the focus being on sculptural shapes that alter the natural silhouette of the body. It is this quality that first drew Gene Sherman to their designs, and besides a handful of isolated examples, the 62-piece collection that was recently donated to the Powerhouse Museum is predominantly black, with some scatterings of dark navies and charcoals.
The exhibition includes a video installation showing a demonstration of Issey Miyake’s A-POC line at the Powerhouse Museum in 2005.
In Japan, kuro (black) has long symbolised nobility and experience, as in the karate black belt. Of course, it is a mistake to think there is only one black: as sumi-e (Japanese ink paintings) show us, there are endless possibilities of tones and textures within blackness. Kawakubo is often quoted as saying “I work in three shades of black”, and while she introduced bright colours and prints in later collections she has – like her early partner Yamamoto and their predecessor of several years, Mikaye – continued to explore the ambiguity, inconspicuousness and melancholy of blackness.
Written in the early 1930’s, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows suggested that while Westerners have worshipped light in the name of progress and clarity, the Japanese have preferred the uncertainty and mysterious allure of shadows, training the eye to adapt to the dark so as to discover what lies within it.
Blackness holds possibility, and is related to the more general austerity of Japanese beauty that is continued by these designers through their pure geometric forms with minimal embellishment. Related to this is the elusive ideal of wabi sabi, probably the most characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese aesthetics. An appreciation of imperfection, irregularity, impermanence and incompletion, this wabi sabi is found in the blackness, modesty, simplicity of lines, asymmetrically and raw finishings of Kawakubo, Miyake and Yamamoto’s clothes.
While often talked about as groundbreaking, these three designers in fact have posses great reverence for Japan’s cultural heritage and artistic traditions. At different times and to varying degrees, each of them has reverted back to elements of their country’s indigenous dress, such as the Yōji Yamamoto black evening coat with kimono sleeves that is on display as part of the Gene Sherman collection.
The basic adult kimono (ki mono meaning ‘a thing to wear’) comes in two sizes – man and woman – and has never deviated from its basic, untailored T shape. Rather than emphasizing the human form and striving for the ideal figure, as Western dress has done, the kimono has its own shape and structure that is independent of the individual wearer. It retains its own basic geometric form with little regard for the body’s biological contours, and contemporary Japanese fashion retains this principal.
Where’s the body? The oversized / layered look that caused a sensation when it was first presented by these Japanese designers on Paris runways in the 1980s is reminiscent of the jūnihitoe, a heavy and complex twelve layered robe worn by Japanese court women which virtually swallowed their bodies into oblivion. Above: Empress Nagako in jūnihitoe (1926) and Comme des Garçons AW2009.
Accumulated by Dr Sherman over two decades, this extensive and idiosyncratic archive reminds us that while Japan’s national dress has largely been replaced with modern ‘Western’ styles, contemporary Japanese fashion remains bound up with highly refined traditional values and techniques.
Remarkably, none of the collection – which goes back as early as 1989 – has dated in the least. Disregarding seasonal trends in favour of a more singular vision that continues ancestral thinking, the designers have defied the fashion industry’s emphasis on being in fashion while remaining very much at the cutting edge of ideas. In this way, the design houses of Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yōji Yamamoto, along with those of their peers and successors, are continuing to lead fashion into the future while borrowing from the shadows of their culture’s past.
I was fortunate to hear Gene talk about her collection at the Power House museaum. I am still trying to narrow my wardrobe down to 20 pieces? It is an extrodinary collection that has not dated at all and I would love to wear any or all the pieces Gene has most generously donated. A must see.
Comment by Di van Ooi — May 27, 2010 @ 12:33 pmDi