In conversation: Yohji Yamamoto & Tim Blanks

ELI5/TLDR

Yohji Yamamoto, the Japanese designer who turned black and looseness into a worldview and made Paris uncomfortable in 1981, sits down with Tim Blanks — fashion’s most patient interviewer — and gives the kind of interview only an 80-year-old can give. He says he’s not a fashion designer, he’s a clothing maker. He says he’s ready to leave. He says he was angry because his father went to a war he didn’t return from, and that’s why he’s been on the side of women since he was five. The conversation is short, slow, and full of half-finished sentences that mean more than the finished ones.

The Full Story

Paris, 16 years ago

Blanks opens with Paris. Yamamoto arrived by train from Russia, through northern Europe and Germany. He doesn’t remember which station — Gare du Nord or Gare de l’Est — but he remembers the smell.

The first moment I get out from the train, I got smell of a Gitane, and I heard the very high tone talking of people, like fighting each other. It was noisy noisy and smelly, and I felt ‘Oh this is my town’.

He says he’s lived there 16 years. He started smoking when he arrived. Blanks says it’s not good. Yamamoto says, “I’m still alive.”

Anger as a method

Blanks pulls out an old line — that Yamamoto once said you have to be angry to be a fashion designer. He still believes it. The anger has a source, and the source is a five-year-old boy in a Shinjuku kindergarten taking care of a tiny girl, and a father he never met.

He was picked up to the war, and the final vocabulary he gave to my mother: ‘Because I was given the summer uniform. Maybe I’ll be sent to the south’. That is his final vocabulary.

The father never came back. The boy started, around five or six, becoming angry at the Japanese army. He has been standing on the women’s side ever since. Sixty-five years of grown men making wars, and a tailor’s son taking the women’s side every season — that is the whole story compressed.

He turned 80 last October. He looked back. He says, “Oh, it was destiny.” Blanks pushes — you make your own fate, no? Yamamoto won’t take the credit.

I even didn’t want to become clothes maker, fashion designer. I really hated the vocabulary so-called fashion. Fashion? Too light.

He calls himself a clothing maker. The word “fashion” annoys him the way the word “content” annoys writers.

Three doors

He says he had three choices growing up: musician, painter, clothing maker. His mother sewed for the neighborhood, so he followed her — naturally, he says, the way water finds the slope. Blanks notes that he paints with clothes and makes music with clothes anyway, that the three doors became one door. Yamamoto allows it, briefly. Then he says clothing-making is suffering. He’s frustrated, he says. Always frustrated. He could have been somebody else.

The 1981 Paris show

Blanks doesn’t name the year, but he gestures at it — when Yamamoto first arrived in Paris with his collection.

80% of journalists they hated it, hated me, and 20% they approached me. It was nice.

He doesn’t read this as victory. He reads it as misunderstanding — a word he keeps returning to, almost lovingly. Blanks tells him he is loved, respected, revered. Yamamoto says, three times, “I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Just misunderstanding.” It’s not false modesty, exactly. It’s that he doesn’t trust the agreement of crowds. The 20% who got it weren’t getting him; they were getting another misunderstanding that happened to be useful.

Black, white, funerals

Blanks remembers a thing Yamamoto once said about black being arrogant. Yamamoto pretends not to remember, then partly remembers — humble and arrogant. For Japanese people, he says, black is a funeral color, worn only when somebody dies. Blanks can’t help himself: “You mean life is a constant funeral?” Yamamoto laughs. “This is just a joke.”

He once thought white was the death color in Japan, he says, and then he did a season of only wedding dresses because he had run out of imagination for new outfits. The Americans loved it. They threw him a party. He was surprised. He was curious about that. The whole exchange has the shape of a koan: he ran out of ideas, did the death color, and the Americans called it a wedding.

Beauty rearranged

Blanks asks what’s the point of making clothes when the world is killing itself. Yamamoto says he can’t change the world, can’t change people’s minds. But maybe one small thing.

If I can do something I can change a little bit of the value of beauty. In the old time something so-called dirty already, they are beautiful for me, different side of looking at. You have to be free to look at something.

This is the design philosophy in two sentences. Take the things people throw away — wear, asymmetry, holes, dust, age — and rearrange the angle from which they’re seen. He calls it breaking people’s cages. Blanks calls it the same thing.

Limit, luck, leaving

Blanks asks if he believes in wisdom. Yamamoto says he doesn’t believe in it but we need it. Asked about luck, he says yes, but you have to have the power to catch it. His favorite word, he says, is limit.

You have to know the limit. Limit is my favorite vocabulary.

It’s a strange thing for an avant-garde designer to say. The man who blew open the silhouette in 1981 says the most important word is the one that tells you when to stop.

He has done 80% of what he wanted to do. He is, he says, ready to disappear. His mother lived to 112 and died last year, enjoying every purchase. He doesn’t want to live to 114. He wants his son or eldest daughter to take over the company, but he isn’t sure the staff will accept a dynasty. Blanks lets him trail off. They agree to do karaoke in Tokyo. Yamamoto’s favorite is Bob Dylan. Specifically Desolation Row, but it’s too long for most karaoke shops.

Key Takeaways

The clothing-maker, not fashion-designer distinction. He thinks “fashion” is too light a word for what he does. The job is making clothes that someone has to put on a body. Everything downstream of that is somebody else’s problem.
Anger as fuel, not pose. The anger predates the work by 25 years. It comes from a missing father, a war, and a five-year-old’s loyalty to a smaller five-year-old. Without it he says he’d be dead or in prison.
Misunderstanding as a creative climate. He doesn’t expect to be understood. He prefers it. The 80% who hated his first Paris show were doing their job; the 20% who liked it were also misreading him. Both are fine.
Limit as core principle. His favorite word. The avant-garde designer’s avant-garde move is restraint — knowing where the cut stops, where the season ends, where the self ends.
Beauty as re-angling. Not invention, not novelty. Just a different side of looking at the dirty, the worn, the discarded — and showing that people had agreed too fast on what was beautiful.
Things he hates: the word “fashion”; the Japanese army; American smoking laws (“welcome to Marlboro country”); cowboys (after he realized they killed too many Indians); optimism (it would kill the work).
Working method as inheritance. His mother sewed for the neighborhood. He followed her downstairs. The atelier is, in his telling, just an extension of a Shinjuku front room.

Claude’s Take

Tim Blanks is the right interviewer for this because he doesn’t push. He floats lines from old Yamamoto interviews back at the man and waits to see which ones still hold. Most of them do. Some Yamamoto disowns (“black is arrogant” — he pretends he doesn’t remember saying it, then half-claims it back). What you get is not a profile but a slow circling of three or four ideas: the missing father, the women’s side, the misunderstanding, the limit.

The thing that lands hardest is how unflattered Yamamoto is by his own legend. Blanks tells him he is revered. He says no. Three times, no. It doesn’t read as performance because he isn’t selling anything — he’s 80, the 80% is done, the karaoke is queued. The interview is mostly about a man who was given a long life and used it to side with whoever was getting smaller in the frame.

One score docked because it’s short and the subtitles miss occasional words. But it’s a clean transmission of a designer most write-ups dress up too much. Blanks lets him be deadpan, half-finished, and quietly furious. That’s the right register for Yamamoto.