Remembering Kansai Yamamoto, Japanese fashion designer (1944-2020)

David Bowie’s alter ego creator, the Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto died in a Tokyo hospital on July 21, the cause was leukemia, a statement confirmed. He was 76. One of the Japanese designers, responsible for many Japanese young talents to find their way. Yamamoto was born in 1944 in Yokohama, Japan. He focused on civil engineering in high school, and majored in English at the Nippon University until he dropped out in 1965 to focus on fashion. He apprenticed at ateliers of designers Junko Koshino and Hisashi Hosono while studying fashion on his own. He was awarded the Soen prize by the Bunka Fashion College in 1967.

Reading his life story (not knowing much before), I must say that I am very nice and positively surprised. Yamamoto’s work displayed an aesthetic of “wild maximalism”. It has been described as “transgressive excess” and the “opposite” of the concept of wabi-sabi. Maximalism in fashion can be described as adding (all the colors, loud prints, embellishments)… and then adding again, more and more, ie ‘more is more’. Yamamoto is all that, but wild. In 1971, he opened his own company, Yamamoto Kansai Company, Ltd., Tokyo. His first collection debuted the same year in London and the United States at Hess’s Department Store in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which was renowned for many avant-garde collections. He was the first Japanese designer to have a show in London. Kansai became famed for creating androgynous and futuristic stage costumes for David Bowie – most notably for his Ziggy Stardust Tour.

Kansai became famed for creating androgynous and futuristic stage costumes for David Bowie – most notably for his Ziggy Stardust Tour. When David Bowie wore Yamamoto’s designs, Yamamoto told Dazed in 2016, “some sort of chemical reaction took place: My clothes became part of David, his songs and his music. They became part of the message he delivered to the world.”

When Yamamoto was young, the media described him as “kisai” (genius), “fuun-ji” (trailblazer), “kiso-zoku no ganso” (founder of weirdly dressed gang), among others. “Being recognized as ‘No. 1 in Japan’ isn’t what I want,” Yamamoto noted of the resounding success of his show in London. His 1975 debut in Paris was followed by the opening of his Kansai Boutique in 1977. He received the Tokyo Fashion Editors award in 1977. He presented his final collection for fall/winter of 1992, although he kept lending his name to licensed products ranging from eyeglasses to tableware. After that he began a career as an event producer, notably for events he titled “Super Shows”.

 He is also known for his avant-garde kimono designs, including ones worn by Bowie. In 1999 he organized a fashion program under the aegis of the India-Japan Mixed Cultural Cooperation Committee. In 2008, an exhibit named “Netsuki Shinten: Kansai Genki Shugi” (or “Passionate Exhibit: The Energy Principle of Kansai”) was held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. In 2009, a major retrospective of Yamamoto’s work was exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Yamamoto designed the Skyliner train, unveiled in 2010, that connects Japan’s Narita Airport with central Tokyo. In July 2013, he made a comeback to the fashion industry with a showing in the 19th New Britain Mask Festival in Kokopo, Papua New Guinea. The same year he held a smaller scale fashion show at Tokyo, and a series of live fashion shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2018 Yamamoto and Louis Vuitton worked together to create classic Japanese art and Kabuki-inspired patterns and prints for LV’s Resort 2018 collection.

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