Эссе на тему: Japanese fashion: Kenzo, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto

In the second half of the twentieth century, significant changes took place in the fashion world. After a decade in which the industry was almost entirely focused on the fashion houses of Paris and Milan, a wave of progressive avant-garde designers began to appear in Tokyo in the 1970s. Japanese designers owe their success primarily to the fact that they did not follow the well-trodden path of their Western colleagues, but found their own individual style. A distinctive feature of Japanese designers is their native conceptualism, their love of unusual experiments with shape and cut, and their amazing proximity to nature and its subtle interpretation. At first, the fashion aesthetics of these designers and their innovative approaches to creating clothes caused a mixed reaction from the fashion public, but as the seasons and collections changed, the world was forced to admit how much they were ahead of their time.

Kenzo, Issey Miyake, Yoji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo – these are the names of the first ones who changed the design philosophy and made clothes the way we know and wear them now. They did it 40 years ago. Paris first met Japanese fashion designers in the 70s. Then ethnic style comes into fashion. The Orient, Buddhism, and yoga are becoming incredibly popular in Europe. It's not just designers who are looking for new shapes and colors – the disillusioned baby boomer generation of the 60s is looking for new ideas for a new lifestyle in Eastern philosophy.

The 1970s were a time when the European type ceased to dominate the fashion scene. Pierre Cardin, Louis Feraud, Paco Rabanne are the first to invite "colored" models to participate in the shows." Black models like Iman and Beverly Johnson are becoming famous. Haute couture fashion is changing the perception of beauty standards: they no longer exist, beauty can be different. The idols of young people at that time were the Nicaraguan Bianca Jagger, the first wife of Mick Jagger, and Angela Davis, an opponent of racial discrimination, thanks to whom hairstyles "a la Angela Davis" became fashionable.

It is also worth noting the fact that in the second half of the 20th century, everyone imagined Japan as a country of cheap, low-quality goods that were sold on the streets of New York for a dollar apiece. Japan itself, occupied by the Allied forces after World War II, was discovering Western culture and European clothing. Tokyo's fashionistas have swapped loose kimonos for fitted suits, and geta for stilettos.

Kenzo Takada was the first to gain recognition in the West. His clothes combined Japanese and European traditions, were very bright, had many patterns and a simple cut. In the early 70s, high-end designers (Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel) created very elegant but rather boring clothes, which clearly did not meet the demands of society at that time. Kenzo Takada, with his incredible shades, sweeping floral patterns and comfortable cut, was able to create a completely new Parisian style.

Due to his Oriental origin, incredible creativity, and sometimes just a lack of money, Kenzo anticipated many trends in the fashion industry. He started selling clothes straight from the catwalk, not six months after the collection was released, as other fashion designers did. And each show of his collection was an enchanting show.

The designer wanted the images he created to be harmonious. In this regard, he thought about creating his own fragrance. From 1978 to 1980, he worked on the creation of perfume. The result is an oriental, spicy, unusual fragrance called "King Kong". The customers took the novelty with a bang and actively bought it. But two years later, the perfume disappeared, and instead a less exotic, but very seductive floral-fruity "Ca sent beau" appeared.

In 1983, the first men's collection "Around the World in 80 Days" was released. It was a mix of Eastern and European culture, which featured elements of folk costumes from different countries.

Over and over, Kenzo created his collections, which were the same as they were many years ago – bright, challenging, and extraordinary. But in 1993, the designer sold his fashion house to LVMH, but he held the position of creative director for another 6 years. In 1999, Kenzo decided to retire from fashion, and marked his departure with another extraordinary show, during which he gave the audience a virtual tour of Hong Kong, Russia, Africa, Japan and, of course, Paris.

Following Kenzo Takada, the founder of Kenzo, in the 1970s and 1980s, a whole generation of new creators from Japan, such as Issey Miyake, Yoji Yamamoto and Ray Kawakubo, ascended the world catwalks, shocking the experienced Western public with completely different collections. The collections of the 80s by these Japanese designers pose new questions to the public that no one has asked before.

The clothes created by Yoji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo reflect more than just a protest to the glamorous and "sleek" catwalk, their collections carry a new philosophy of the postmodern world, the transition from mass consumption to individualism and self-expression.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a new trend in fashion appeared –

Deconstructivism. The emergence of this style was marked by global transformations in society – the transition from modernity to postmodern ideas. In the second half of the twentieth century, these ideas exhausted themselves, people no longer feel universal guidelines and values. At this time, new concepts appeared, including deconstructivism, a philosophical trend that was founded by Heidegger and Derrida. By and large, deconstruction is a new way of looking at the world, which breaks down familiar concepts that are opposed to each other and combines them in a new text.

The main features of deconstructivism in the fashion industry are radicalism as the destruction of stereotypes, self-criticism of fashion, the erasure of authorship, and the expression of social protest. Deconstruction differs in that it does not emphasize the special geometry of the male and female bodies, but completely rebuilds it, exaggerating the natural body volumes or creating completely new ones. The collections of Japanese designers give the impression that they combine the incongruous – very different fabrics, garments of completely different styles in one image. but at the same time they look harmonious and attract the eye with their special balance. The answer is simple - Japanese designers simply determine the compatibility of details in other categories. They construct images based on the balance of volumes, focusing attention at the right point with the help of sharp geometric contrasts and broken and jagged lines. The purpose of things is secondary to them, the shape of the thing is important, its appearance in motion – hence the large number of voluminous capes, draped, torn fabrics, and individual pieces sewn together. The "flying" edges of the clothes, triangular silhouettes, and unusual cuts are very minimalistic, very bright, and very clear.

The pioneers of introducing these ideas into fashion were Yeji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. There were challenges to traditional costume before that – the twentieth century was rich in the spread of subcultures in society, such as hippies or Goths, one of the ways of self-expression of which was an extravagant appearance. There were also single collections, partially addressing the problem of the artificiality of the podium. However, popular culture was influenced by the shows in Paris, which were held by Japanese designers in the 80s. In his works, Kawakubo questions the usual division into "beautiful" and "ugly," "dissonance" and "harmony," "masculine" and "feminine." Design designs things-signs and sells emotions and impressions, and the method of deconstructivism is one of the ways to create emotionally significant things [1]. It is emotions and versatility in clothing that come to the fore in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century, and the costume becomes a way of expressing one's individuality as a person. The pretentious pomposity and sexualization of the costume is replaced by deliberate carelessness and androgyny.

"This fashion, which came from the East, represents a completely different view of how clothes should look, different from what we are used to. She seeks to hide, not expose, the body. She doesn't try to seduce with color or texture. It cannot be described in the usual terms, because its forms are fluid, and its proportions do not correspond to human ones..." – this is how they commented on the appearance of collections by Rei Kawakubo and Yoji Yamamoto at fashion shows [2].

Rei Kawakubo is a child of war. As a young girl, Rei Kawakubo could not find clothes in Japanese stores that would fully reflect her worldview, and therefore the girl decided to create clothes for herself on her own. Kawakubo, at the time of entering the fashion industry, did not have a design education, having graduated from the Faculty of Literature at Keio University. The future famous Japanese designer entered the fashion path at the moment when she got a freelance job as a stylist at a textile factory, and two years later she began making clothes under the label Comme Des Garçons (as a boy).

As for Yamamoto, he says that the war inspires him. Yeji's father, a soldier, died during World War II. Approximately 98% of Yamamoto's models are made in black. He presented his first black collection in 1977 at the pret-a-porter week in Tokyo, and in 1981 in Paris. Mannequins without makeup, wearing rough shoes without heels, and wearing black clothes walked along the catwalk to psychedelic music. The press called this show "the end of fashion." and intellectuals are works of art. Then this style was called "destructive"/ destructuree look/ destructive look/ deconstructivism. Yamamoto and Kawakubo became its founders, the first to show asymmetrical, as if unfinished clothes: for example, a jacket with one sleeve or a skirt with an uneven hem on one side.