TURNING JAPANESE

In the early 1980s, a small band of Japanese fashion designers lead by Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo brought their strange aesthetic – of art and shadows, space and light – to the runways of Paris. They shocked, were derided, stood firm, then changed our western ways and whys of wearing fashion forever. In a rare coup for fashion connoisseurs, Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) has secured one of the most significant exhibitions of Japanese designers’ oeuvres ever assembled, and is hosting its final international destination before it returns home to the Kyoto Costume Institute.

Here, Janice Breen Burns reviews and researches the unmissable Future Beauty: 30 years of Japanese Fashion, curated by Akiko Fukai, originally for London’s Barbican Gallery, runs until February 15, 2015 at QAGOMA. Voxfrock recommends Melburnians especially (traditional savourers of fashion’s brave new realms) book northern flights ( Virgin Australia and Queensland Tourism offer travel and accomodation packages) and make a delicious meal of this marvellous exhibition with their choice of floor talks, tours, Uplate nights and performances by Japanese and local bands, offered on the gallery’s rich menu of related events. Click here for a frocky kind of Nirvana.

 

Thirty years after they shocked the socks off Paris with their slumped black anti-frocks and crazy, cantilevered co-ordinates, Japanese designers are still rocking fashion to its feminine core. Still pitching pure design over the clingy-sex potential of hips, waists and breasts. Still designing to the beat of their own, inimitable aesthetic. Still so-ooo Japanese.

In Paris’s most recent spring/Summer 2015 pret-a-porter show season, Rei Kawakubo (Commes Des Garcons) sent compositions of tumbled red shapes and ribbons of ripped silk that slapped like bloody shreds around the models’ legs. Yohji Yamamoto suspended slippery silk sheaths and half-jack-lets from bare shoulders and looped ladders of silky string. Jun Takahashi’s (Undercover) fairytale ensembles – some elegantly heavy, some lightly bouncing, were in palettes and textures and silhouettes calibrated to fan our childhood memories. And, Junya Watanabe plumped flat plastic circles, bands and geometric gap shapes into three sticky-outy and ever-so-umistakeably-Japanese dimensions.

Japanese designers, in other words, are still as unabashedly experimental as they ever were. Back in the 1980s however, where the exhibition Future Beauty’s intriguing timeline begins, fashion editors and buyers were less thrilled (as they are now) than utterly bewildered. “They weren’t necessarily trying to shock people in those early days,” says Tarun Nagesh, GoMA’s Asian Arts curator and assistant to Akiko Fukai. “But, they certainly shook things up because they never tried to fit in.”

Japanese fashion splashed down in Paris at a time when Western womenswear was intensely body conscious. Virtual “woman-armour” was hardening to define the decade; tailoring and frocks that amplified melonic breasts, handspan waists, boom-shacka hips and super model legs. Fashion was about strength and sex and strident, feminine feminism and designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Azzedine Alaia, played uber-gorgeous power games with its full complement of fetishised symbolism.

Yamamoto and Kawakubo were first, in 1981, to bang down their shocking alternatives. Shockingly ugly. Rips and holes, frayed edges and apparently anti-feminine silhouettes of formless bulk. Future Beauty curator Akiko Fukai says frankly: “They appeared to be an endorsement of shabbiness. They lacked or defied the notion of shape and when a woman put on one of these garments, her feminine form disappeared.”

Critics howled. The sacrilege! Where was the beauty? The allure? Where was the seductive hint of breast, kink of waist, curve of hips in these shapeless, ugly things? Was this even fashion? One consequence was certain: there would be no wolf whistles for this lot, no admiring glances for the Yamamoto or Kawakubo woman from blokey passers-by.

But – and it was a big “but” that would change millions of minds – there would be something else to admire. There would be more delicate, intellectual and universal ways that “beholders” – including men – could engage with this extraordinary aesthetic. The play of light on and through fabrics folded, gathered, ruched or dropped flat as a wall, for one. The juxtaposition of subtly different textures, one against another, against many. The elegant (and sexy, if the beholder were that way inclined) notion of space and shadow and shape between fabric and the wearer’s body. (A notion recognised in Japanese sartorial tradition as “Ma”.)

And, there was a baser, primal, revelation in Japanese fashion: it liberated women (if they wished to be liberated) from the allure (or apparent lack of it) of their own body. By ignoring the so-called “male gaze” – fashion’s principle mused in the west for millentia – Japanese fashion was perfectly pitched for its time in Paris “(Japanese fashion) brought other qualities to the fore,” Mr. Nagesh confirms, “Textural qualities, shape, fabric design, colour…”

A new kind of beauty. A new aesthetic in fact, with silken ties to an old kind, described in a seminal Japanese text, In Praise of Shadows. The essay has underpinned the study of art, design, architecture and crafts in Japan since its publication in 1933 and almost certainly (though there is no direct evidence) was muse to Yamamoto and the otherwise untrained Rei Kawakubo. “It was, and is, hugely important in Japanese art and design,” says Mr. Nagesh.

Junichiro Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows against a backdrop of aggressive modernisation in Japan. He poetically defended the subtle beauty of Japanese crafts, architecture and traditions evolved in thousands of years, against the threat of garish western culture: “We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter.” Eastern beauty on the other hand, Mr. Tanizaki wrote, was delicately defined in “the patterns hidden in darkness” and the “faint, frail light” of antiquity. “We find beauty not in the thing itself, but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness that one thing against another creates…”

Future Beauty offers viewers a wonderfully jerky journey, from Mr. Tanizaki’s poetic philosophy, as shockingly expressed in Paris in the early 1980s, through a timeline of four sweepingly elegant rooms entitled In Praise of Shadows, Flatness, Tradition and Innovation and Cool Japan.

Literal definitions of beauty switch, collide, oscillate, east to west, mixtures of both, from room to room, mannequin to mannequin. A breathtake and “How lovely..!” can be two heartbeats apart from a head-shaking, “How ridiculous..!” Such is the disparity between one definition and the next.

 

In the room Flatness, a chorus line of mannequins wear angular little frocklets with jutting folds and sharp cut-outs; three-dimensional versions of the flat-laid squares, diamonds and stars of fabric at their feet. The trickery is uniquely Japanese, linked to two-dimensional DNA of kimono and the complex loveliness of origami. “They put as much thought into the unworn garment,” says Mr. Nagesh, “As the form and space it creates as it extends away from the body.”

In the room, Tradition and Innovation, flatness meets fragile blue organdie, sheer as fly wings, intricately folded into origami-esque “fabric”. The stuff is an airy handspan wide – you can see “into” its surface – gently goaded into what roughly resembles a top and skirt. Junya Watanabe showed the design for Commes des Garcons’ autumn/winter 2001 in Paris and it is one of Future Beauty’s most astonishingly lovely exhibits.

The exhibition’s fourth room, Cool Japan, marks the popularity spike of young Japanese designers in the 1990s and 2000s. Like their veteran predecessors, Yamamoto, Kawakubo, Miyake, Watanabe, Takahashi, many others, these young iconoclasts took off along yet another unique trajectory, utterly Japanese. They borrowed heavily from Manga and Anime cariacatures, Lolita-doll costumery and cutesy pop-cultural iconography for inspiration and spawned (or, possibly it was the other way around) the generations of replicants still teaming in Tokyo’s infamous Harajuku district.

Future Beauty’s roller-coaster view of Japanese fashion – beautiful, to bizarre, to lovely, to weird, to… – stops short at “silly” in the Cool Japan room. Violent colour and cuteness are jarring reminders that Tanizaki’s elegant ode to shadows is abandoned, at leat for now. There is, however, the thrilling prospect of a fresh batch of young Japanese designers brewing now and history proves they have a habit of taking fashion in thrilling new directions. “They just have an amazing sense of what can be done,” says Mr. Nagesh, “And they do it.”