Certainly, to lump together Hanae Mori’s lavishly printed silks, Miyake’s technology of pleats, Matsuda’s nostalgic retro mode, and Kawakubo’s radically deconstructive vision, suppresses the differences within this highly diverse group. The fashion world and the larger cultural and historical discourses of which it is a part circulate the tropes of both individual creativity and national identity.
For the moment, I am highlighting the racial/political elements at work in the construction of a national identity, but both the trope of individual genius and the trope of national essence must be interrogated. Indeed, essentialist national identities are most strongly asserted in the case of the so-called avant-garde of Japanese fashion.
“Japanese designer” usually designates one of the three-Miyake, Kawakubo, Yamamoto–who, according to New York designer Diane Pernet, gave fashion its “last big shock” (1989). Fashion commentators categorize their related yet distinct work in terms of its experimental moves, which are then traced to Japanese aesthetics, traditions, and costumes, or to some overarching postmodernity.
Generally, journalists and fashion analysts single out several distinctive features of “Japanese fashion” in the early 1980s, and with some ambivalence about the essentializing effects of these discourses, I reproduce that commentary here.
First is the premium placed on the cloth as a point of departure for design. The fabrics themselves are often in-house designs, specially commissioned, artisanally produced textiles, or startling synthetics that draw on the best of available technology.
Yohji Yamamoto speaks of nuno no hyojo, the expression of the cloth, “displaying what is inherent in the cloth: wrinkles in linen, puckers along a seam, the texture of hand-washed silk satin” (Stinchecum 74). Miyake explicitly likens fabric to “the grain in wood. You can’t go against it. I close my eyes and let the fabric tell me what to do” (Cocks 1986, 70).
Like the others, Kawakubo experiments with new textures and dyes. Her inspiration “is different types of fabric she has seen in her lifetime-not necessarily clothing but perhaps a piece of paper or carpeting” (Sidorsky 18). She is known for her aesthetic of imperfection and asymmetry,II and has reportedly been known to loosen a screw on a loom in order to introduce the surprise of the imperfect, the trace of the handmade, into the process of mechanical reproduction.
Yamamoto, like Miyake and Kawakubo, appreciates the playful and innovative use of a variety of unexpected materials. In an interview, Barbara Weiser of the boutique Charivari voiced to me her surprise at finding Yohji garments made from the fabric used to cover tennis balls (1989).
Similarly, Issey Miyake both draws on artisanal production from Japan and other sites and explores the technologies of synthetic fabrics. In recent collections, he has pursued the technology of pleats in garments that are often described as museum pieces, evoking images of Fortuny.
Kawakubo works closely with textile designers and producers; their innovations are often featured motifs in her collections. For example, in the 1990 spring-summer collection, “non-woven, man-made” fabric was such a theme. A second commonality costume curator Harold Koda labels “terse expression”: that is, a respect for the integrity of the material and an aversion to cutting into the cloth. He links this aesthetic to the use of cloth in kimono and regional costume, where the bolt is used virtually in its entirety, with relatively little cutting and little waste. “The minimum is used to maximum effect” (1989).
Examining the pattern pieces of one of these garments reveals this tendency toward terse expression. Even in constructing a simple skirt, Miyake uses one entire piece of cloth to achieve the draping (rather than depending, for example, on multiple pieces cut on the bias).
A conventional Western skirt involves greater waste of the material, as pattern pieces are laid out and then cut from fabric; if the pattern is arranged on the bias of the fabric, the waste will be even greater. On the body, the two skirts may seem similar, even identical, to the untrained eye; however, at the level of construction, the differences are stunning.
For example, Miyake is said to work with the fabric first, draping it over himself, then draping it on a model, and only then making up sketches A related innovation prevalent in the clothing of the early 1980s and less apparent in contemporary designs are garments in one size.
These commentators link to the conventions of kimono, which come in a single size and are adjusted to fit the body of the wearer through wrapping and tying. Barbara Weiser (the owner, with her mother and brother, of the highly successful Charivari boutiques in Manhattan) described her first encounter with Yamamoto’s work:
It was…maybe 1979… What happened was that I was in Paris for the collections…rather disappointed and bored with what we saw that season, and I decided to go hunting. I went to Les HaIles … into a shop on the rue du Cygne, and there were these garments that had the oddest look. They looked slightly like hospital gowns in fabrics and forms that I had never seen, and they were all one size, which was in itself radical, and they were moderately priced at that point.
I took about 15 or 20 pieces into the fitting rooms, and tried them all on and found that they were fascinating when I put them on the body. Actually you couldn’t tell how interesting the forms were when they were just hanging on the racks. I remember calling my mother at the hotel and said that she had to come immediately and see them, because they were the most interesting garments I had seen. I didn’t know if I loved them or what: I just am utterly stunned.
My mother and I, who are not the same size, she started trying on the exact same pieces, which was also odd in itself. And she immediately asked them if they had a collection, and it turned out that they had just opened the store, so it was in the back or upstairs. They wheeled out the racks, and we were buying the collection. (November 13, 1989)
Weiser is literally invested in Yamamoto’s clothing as the retailer who introduced his line to the U.S., and she portrays them accordingly in the most laudatory terms. Still, her encounter is eloquent testimony to the shock Japanese garments provoked when they first appeared in Paris.
Finally, Japanese designers are credited with the predominance of the color black during the early 1980s. Indeed, in Japan the unrelenting black-on-black aesthetic earned devotees of Kawakubo and Yamamoto the nickname karasuzoku, the crow tribe. In the U.S. Kawakubo and Yamamoto’s explorations of black defined the 1980s all-black, hip, downtown/art-world look in New York.
Jeff Weinstein of The Village Voice argues that for Kawakubo “‘black’ becomes a full spectrum, an examination of the relationship between fiber and dye” (1989). Certainly, the emphasis on black permeated fashion in advanced capitalist nations, as did the loose cuts of clothing prevalent during this period.
In the early 1980s, then, the Japanese avant-garde are grouped through their experimentation with fabrication, the use of black, the innovation of one-size garments, and traditions of wrapping: layering the body in various configurations of cloth and using materials to form an architectural/sculptural space around the body, rather than tailoring clothing close to the body.
There is a level at which these observations from fashion commentators are perceptive and revealing of themes and continuities. Yet at another level the very act of labelling these designers and tracing their commonalities to cultural continuity remains problematic.
In an interview with Comme des Garçons designer and president Rei Kawakubo, Dorinne Kondo explicitly asked about her take on primarily Western journalistic reactions to her work that emphasized its putative Japanese elements. Kawakubo responded with some asperity:
DK: I’d like to ask in some detail about aesthetics…. In the foreign press, there’s usually a lot of talk about Japanese aesthetics, like sabilwabi. ••• I’m wondering how you feel the clothing has been covered in the foreign press.
RK: Do you feel sabilwabi? About Japan? Something … that exists only in Japan, even though it doesn’t exist in your country? Do you have that sense?
DK: I wonder … I think it probably exists elsewhere …
RK: So, I don’t especially … feel it. It’s not important. For me.
DK: Others give that interpretation.
RK: I’ve seen so-called ‘traditional’ culture maybe once in school, when I had to. Things like Kabuki, one time only, for a class in elementary school.
In this interchange, Kawakubo impatiently resists definitions of Japanese identity that reinscribe conventional notions of traditional culture. Her world is transnational, more “Western” in conventional terms than “traditionally Japanese.” More important, this new version of identity itself displaces and shifts the terms of an East/West dichotomy, in a Japan that is itself constituted through incorporation of the West.
Further, Kawakubo goes on to comment on the label “Japanese designer.” Joining our discussions was the Comme des Garçons international press liaison Jan Kawata:
DK: And what do you think of being grouped as a “Japanese designer”?
RK: I wonder whether they say it elsewhere: “American designer, American designer.”
JK: They don’t.
RK: It’s the individual’s name, probably.
JK: The top countries are America and France, and the other countries …
RK: … are number two, so they use the name of the country.
Clearly, for Kawakubo and her staff, as well as for other Japanese designers, grouping on the basis of race and nationality undermines the distinctiveness of her work, assimilates it to an essentialized notion of tradition that she eschews, and indexes Japan’s secondary status in the fashion world.
As Kawakubo’s responses indicate, troping in terms of national essence can easily be turned toward Eurocentric and Orientalist ends. In these appropriations, the Japanese are “not quite/not white:” simultaneously inadequate “imitators” of Western fashion and a racial threat. Racial overtones emerge blatantly, in the Associated Press coverage of the Paris collections in the early ’80s:
“Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçns proved as usual to be the high priestess of the Jap wrap. Women~ Wear Daily and other unsympathetic gatekeepers dubbed the black, asymmetrical garments “the Hiroshima bag-lady look.” Condescension and dismissal are sometimes shown in subtle ways.
Writer and publisher James Nelson pointed out (1989) the frequent misspellings of the names of Japanese designers in early articles in Vogue and in British fashion magazines. He passionately contends that such mistakes would be neither committed nor tolerated with European or American designers. The misspellings, though seemingly trivial, are gestures that tell us who counts and who does not.
In 1989, the misattributions continued. The expensive ($300) trade publication The Fashion Guide-a supposedly comprehensive who’s-who in the industry–contains numerous errors in their information on Japanese designers. Comme des Gançons, Rei Kawakubo’s company, is listed as French. And Kawakubo’s name is given, in the introduction to Japanese fashion, as “Hai Kawakube”! Misspellings proliferate: “Harajuku,” a trendy Tokyo hangout, is rendered “Harajuka”; Hiromichi Nakano comes across as “Wakano,” the Bigi group as “Higi,” and so on (416).
American, French, British, and Italian designers suffer no such orthographic indignities. Reception among retailers seemed equally mixed. Jeff Weinstein of the Village Voice described the “shabby little Japanese design comers” in major department stores during the heyday of Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. “It’s not treated well; you walk in and you look at their Ralph Lauren boutique-it’s all very prim and proper. This they don’t give a damn about” (1989).
The marginalization of the work of Japanese designers he attributed to racism and to a climate of Japan-bashing. Like Weinstein, in her interview Barbara Weiser noted the anti-Japanese reaction in the fashion world, linking it to wider issues of trade and economic competition during a period when Japan-bashing was (and continues to be) in the air.
Just as the daring of Japanese clothing has provoked virulent negative response, so has it attracted acclaim. Hanae Mori was awarded the Chevalier des lettres, from the French government. The Musee des Arts Decoratifs mounted an exhibition of Miyake’s work in the winter of 1988, and costume curator at the Museum, Yvonne Deslandres, calls him “the greatest creator of clothing of our time” (Cocks 1986,67).
Innovative designers Claude Montana and Romeo Gigli acknowledge Issey Miyake as a major influence. The corps of French fashion journalists presented Miyake with an “Oscar” of fashion as the best international designer at their first awards ceremony in October 1985. Indeed, his work earns him the greatest accolade the fashion industry can bestow: “son style depasse les modes” (Elle, Feb. 3, 1986, 58), “his style goes beyond fashion.
But praise can be in the form of a backhanded compliment; it can also construct limits and create a colonizing distance, even as it celebrates. Take, for example, the trendy downtown magazine Details (before it became a Conde Nast publication and a mainstream men’s magazine), which described the 1988 Mori haute-couture collections with this Orientalizing gesture:
Hanae Mori happily returned to her roots with fabulously painted panels on silk crepe, their motif lifted from ancient Japanese art screens. The fabric, uncut, formed flowing kimono evening dresses. What a lovely surprise to see Madame Mori return to her original source of inspiration after years of misguided attempts to imitate European style (Cunningham 121).
Laudatory though this passage may seem to be, the subtext is “East is East and West is West,” and attempts to blur the boundaries are “misguided.” Only when the motifs are “ancient” and recognizable as kimono are they successful. Mori’s transgression—designing Western clothes indistinguishable from the work of Western designers-produces Cunningham’s anxiety and condescension.
The racial menace of “not white” provokes the dismissive term “imitation,” minimizing the racial threat by consigning her work to the “not quite.” “Stay Japanese”-according to some stereotyped view of Japanese-ness-the passage tells us.
This familiar operation of Orientalism typically results in a Western commentator’s melancholia in the face of the Westernization of a Third World or racialized Other. Orientalist melancholia is in part a form of mourning the perceived impending loss of hislher object of study and the concomitant threat to the commentator’s site of privilege, as Rey Chow (1993) acutely demonstrated in her critique of East Asian Studies in the U.S.
In a similar vein, an editor with a major French fashion magazine told me that many fashion professionals in France are fascinated with Japan, for they consider it to be the only country truly able to appreciate and understand French fashion on an aesthetic level. What appears to be a lavish compliment seems less flattering on closer examination.
In fact, the utterance reasserts the centrality of French fashion as standard which only Japan can appreciate or approach. Surely the elevation of Japan to the position of France’s appreciative audience scarcely constructs the relationship as an equal one.
In both cases, Japan is “not quite/not white,” almost but not quite France’s equal in the latter example, contained within a “culture garden” (Chow 1990) of kimonos, butterflies, and silk in the former. Recirculated Orientalist discourses and racial marking provoke counter Orientalist responses.
The late Tokio Kumagai offered this view: I’m working in the “fashion” world, but I also have hopes for political trends and such to go a certain way. In the latter half of the twentieth century, there exist many different. ..ways of life. But I think it is wrong to invade or to negate another culture.. .in other words, another way of life, through an economic system or political might, simply because of the fact that one part of the population has more power. I think we have to make a world where different cultures can cooperate and move forward.
Even in Japanese fashion, the inclination toward white people has been strong. There’s something wrong with thinking that white people’s culture created at the end of the nineteenth century is more beautiful and powerful than any other. “Beauty” is something found in different ways among Japanese, in Chinese, in Black people; the notion that a fixed proportion is beautiful is nothing more than a prejudice.
Because “beauty” is not something you can dictate from a position of authority. (1986) In this statement, Kumagai explicitly links the present state of the Japanese fashion world to political events such as the “opening” of Japan in the Meiji period, and he passionately argues against the enshrinement of “white people’s culture” in Japan, where power and standards of beauty are directly related.
In arguing for a multiplicity of definitions of beauty, Kumagai enacts an oppositional gesture, contesting hegemonic European and American aesthetic canons. The passionate and ambivalent reactions to Japanese fashion from all players suggest that the stakes exceed the purely aesthetic, as though such a realm could exist beyond history, politics, economics, or the Law of the Father.
At issue are global geopolitical relations, where the historically sedimented terms “Japan/Europe” and “Japan/U.S.” bristle with significance. Though this essay can but gesture toward these wider contests for power, surely the arrival of Japanese fashion in Paris in the early 1980s, when the Japanese economy was burgeoning, cannot have failed to engender both admiration and fear in the fashion industry as elsewhere.
The rhetoric of war recurs in fashion trade papers and popular fashion magazines just as it does in the popular press and in mainstream business journals. For example, in Vogue’s retrospective of the major fashion influences of the 1980s, Japanese designers are grouped together in a series of photos labelled “the Japanese invasion.
” They were the only designers to be categorized on the basis of nationality, even as their work was acknowledged to be classic. Similarly, a French article on Japanese fashion trumpets its headline “L’offensif japonais,” demonstrating that the language of war and race circulates in Europe as it does in the U.S. The use of martial metaphors reminiscent of other such terms deployed in “the trade war,” reminds us of the inextricability of fashion from capitalist accumulation and interimperial rivalry.