The late fashion designer, Kansai Yamamoto, on dealing with David Bowie

Lasts week, we lost iconic avant-garde designer, Kansai Yamamoto. Yamamoto is best known for this long-term partnership with David Bowie, specifically the outfits for the Martian rocker’s Ziggy Stardust tour.

On the Style United website, there’s a piece about the 2018 Brooklyn Museum evening with Yamamoto, done in assistance of the David Bowie Is show.

Here, Yamamoto describes his cooperation with Bowie:

” Unlike me, Bowie was quiet, shy, however on phase he turns a switch and becomes David Bowie,” states Yamamoto. “Me, I’m constantly that way.” However they shared a love of what the designer calls “radical appearance,” and when asked what they learned from each other, he replies that through Bowie he established his understanding of Western dress while he helped Bowie translate Eastern clothing. He concurs that he sees a direct line between what he developed in the 70 s for Bowie and the existing discussion on gender and dress. “I approached Bowie’s clothing as if I was creating for a woman,” he confesses. “Notice there is no zipper in front.” But he feels proud seeing how the younger generation participating in the “David Bowie Is” display can reveal themselves when compared to the societal restrictions he experienced in Japan 50 years earlier, as a self-taught, broke, designer releasing his career at the age of21 A photographer had snapped a photo of him walking along London’s Kings Road and it was featured on the cover of Life publication. “I felt every day I was the design in a fashion show and everybody around me were members of the audience,” he says. “There were often times, individuals took a look at me strange.”

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Images: FashionUnited and FaceMePLS (CC BY 2.0)