Yohji Yamamoto is sick of fast fashion.
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Yohji Yamamoto is sick of fast fashion.
Yohji Yamamoto is sick of fast fashion. Or "groupie fashion," as he calls it. "They all look the same," he said on Saturday in a downtown hotel lounge just hours before his Spring Y-3 show. Y-3, the designer's long-running collaboration with Adidas, is supposed to be an antidote to fast fashion's proliferation. "It's based on a sporty elegance," he said. "It can easily be mixed with pieces from my main line."
Indeed, the runway's best looks were as much about fashion as they were (presumably) about function. (Y-3 is, after all, the predecessor to such high-fashion, legit sport collaborations as Stella McCartney for Adidas and Alexander McQueen for Puma.) This season, Yamamoto collaborated on watery tie-dyed prints with graphics master Peter Saville, best known for designing Joy Division and New Order's most celebrated album covers. A long, multicolored ombré tank dress was brought back from the hippie brink with the strategic placement of black jail stripes on the top. And several pairs of track pants were made to look like suits when paired with a blazer in the same stretchy techno fabric. Things even took an avant-garde turn when Yamamoto decided to create a ball gown out of stretchy material—it had an exaggerated bustle and was worn with an Amish-style bonnet.
For men, the versatile motorcycle jacket was done in a treated nylon—it really could blend easily into a standard wardrobe. But the best thing had to be on the back of a classic black windbreaker: The traditional Adidas three stripes were reimagined in Saville's trippy rainbow tie-dye.
Highly recognizable celebrities—most notably Justin Bieber but also True Blood's chief werewolf—were there, but the true star was Yamamoto, who did a little performance on one of the stage's many drum sets. (A few New York-based drummers occupied those sets during the show as part of the pomp.) While Yamamoto is a known guitar player, the performance was totally improvised. Some people just get all the talent.