Yohji Wave 1

In other Yamamoto London happenings, the new Y-3 flagship store on 24 Conduit Street opened up.  It's odd how much of a game-changer in the way designers worked with accessible brands was when Yamamoto first started collaborating with adidas and now of course this is all taken for granted.  Now Y-3 is a covetable brand in its own right that is still for me one of the more interesting sports/high fashion intersectioned lines despite the saturation of collabs.  Especially when somehow, it supercedes Yamamoto's own work like it has done this season.  Don't shoot, but I did prefer the Y-3 A/W 11-12 collection to Yamamoto's own mainline which took a weirdly aggressive turn.  Call me a fuddy duddy but I prefer the quiet and historically romantic side to Yamamoto's aesthetic.  For Y-3, a dust-covered country road trip somewhere in America (but you don't quite know where...) was the journey that would take us through protective clothing that doesn't just have the fancy look of a warm cocoon (and there are plenty of those this season...) but also does the real job of coping with the outside elements, with fabrics like 'Cool Mad Wool', a breathable wool that isn't insane but has an evaporative cooling system, and 'Diaplex', a wool herringbone bonded to goretex that moulds itself to the body.  Naturally books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild were on Yamamoto's reading agenda.  I was all for the super low-slung backpacks that were literally hanging on the bum along with the warming slouchiness of it all, indicative of Yamamoto's past work, co-opted into pieces that I'd wear should I ever take such a road trip (I'm still trying to make a Las Vegas to Portland driving holiday happen...).

A magnificent Yohji Yamamoto wave has set upon London and I'm happy to see his work lapping upon the shores of our fickle minds.  We may very easily forget the impact and longevity of his work but a trio of exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Wapping Project and The Wapping Project Bankside will hopefully prevent that from ever happening.  I'll be investigating the main V&A and Bankside exhibitions later but to see the first of the trio, I took a weird and winding bus ride down to The Wapping Project.  Housed in the boiler house of the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station is the installation 'Yohji Making Waves'.  I'm not sure if the title is quite befitting to what I saw.  It wasn't noise or heavy crashing that I saw and heard in that cavernous space.  The famous oversized white silk wedding dress with a bamboo crinoline from Yamamoto's A/W 1998 collection has been overturned and suspended in the boiler house room that has been flooded with water.  You can take the boat moored at the side of the room around for a tranquil turn in the waters that eerily reflect the upside down dress.  I sadly couldn't take the boat to get a closer look.  I may even go back just to say that I went to an exhibition where I rode a boat.  You're sucked in as soon as you're closed into the darkness of the space, illuminated only by the bust of the dress and the lights at the side.  The soundtrack as well as the drip of the water gives you a feeling you're buried underground somewhere with this luminous object before you that looks like it's in motion or multiplying on itself because of the reflection.  You also have no idea how deep the water is which makes the space seem like a bottomless vortex, where you float about on water with the Yamamoto dress as your centre of gravity...