English B. Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo

Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. — 192 p. — ISBN: 1847883117,
9781847883117.Since 1970, the work of the Japanese fashion designers has had an unequivocal impact on Western dress. Initiated by lssey Miyake, and followed ten years later by Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, they offered a new and unique expression of creativity, challenging the established notions of status, display and sexuality in contemporary fashion. Miyake celebrated forty years in the fashion business in 2010 and Kawakubo and Yamamoto followed suit in 2011 marking thirty years since their fi rst show in Paris. In London, in the spring of 2011, the Victoria and Albert Museum unveiled a retrospective of Yamamoto’s work, commemorating his contribution to the world of fashion. In the Financial Times Weekend , of 11 October 2009, journalist/photographer Mark O’Flaherty wrote:The middle-ageing of the triumvirate of revolutionary Japanese design is as shocking as any of their more confrontational collections; to many of their modernist followers they still seem like box-fresh radical upstarts, while for the high street they have only recently come into existence through diffusion projects with the likes of H&M and Adidas. So, four decades on, have they really revolutionised the world of fashion?Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Infl uence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo is a book which will provide you with the knowledge that you will need to answer this question. It is not only a study of the aesthetics of fashion but it is a study of cultural aesthetics, and the differences, in this respect, between East and West. There are countless examples in the history of art which evidence how the West has been informed by the East but none quite as dramatic as in the history of contemporary fashion design. This book will provide an understanding of how Japanese thought, tradition and advanced textile technology became an intrinsic part of fashion design practice in the late twentieth century. It will show how the Japanese designers infl uenced a whole generation of young, emerging Belgian designers, amongst others, and how this inter-cultural and inter-generational infl uence has infi ltrated the soul of the international fashion industry.Issey Miyake.
Yohji Yamamoto.
Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons.
The Next Wave of Designers.
Techno Textiles.
Global Infl uences: Challenging Western Traditions.
Notes.
References and Select Bibliography.