yohji yoMAMAyoto

(Get it? YOUR MOM?)
Anyway, ahem.

Yohji Yamamoto began with classic Yohji shapes and concepts-deconstructed white button-down, deconstructed blazers, black, white, a little more black, one gray look, etc. Nothing new, really. It felt a bit as if the first looks were just things he thought of to get ideas rolling, but this resulted in not much we haven't seen before, not in the first half of the show, anyway. One thing that did strike me as being very different from his usual aesthetic was all the "punk rock" pieces-a leather jacket, miniskirts (MINIS! at Yohji!), cuffs and garters, fingerless leather gloves. I wonder if Yamamoto is just late to jumping on the black-and-studs bandwagon, or if he simply wanted to wait until people are tired of Givenchy to have his say. Or, maybe, it isn't that complicated, and he just wanted to present a few less complex, more retail-friendly, more fun pieces. The biker jacket and gloves don't seem to be deconstructed or have much concept behind them, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As Miuccia Prada says, "commercial should not be an insult, like something is not beautiful."

The punk-ish pieces remind me a bit of 90's FRUiTS, actually.

Next, things did get a little more tattered and torn. I love the holes. They're a little more like teary-eyed lace than they are "LOOK, I'M SO HARDCORE I RIPPED MY JEANS. ALSO PS MY NAME IS CHRISTOPHE DECARNIN." (I swear I'll stop on that one soon.) The holes here look like a bunch of delicate baby moths tattered up your long sweater but you love it so much that you'll wear it anyway. I really want to see better detail shots.

And next, NEXT! was my favorite part of the collection. Light baby florals with those delicate holes again. They look like dresses that belonged to your grandmother that you just gently lifted out from an old trunk in the attic (I can actually picture this in my mind, ridiculously well.) They also remind me a bit of The Virgin Suicides* as well, just in the whole feel they give off. They feel like a kind of sad, burned version of an idealistically simple life. I can tell I'm just going to be obsessed with any editorial I see these in for forever. I may need to stimulate the economy and get one of the blazers. Once a few seasons have passed and they cost much less on Yoox, of course.

*I totally just out-pretentious'd myself. Ehh..

I'm not sure what I think of the collection as a whole. I wasn't sure how I felt about the first classic looks, or the "punk" ones, and I thought writing it out would help me figure it out but not really. And as much as I love the last pieces, it almost seems like they were thrown in because, oh, right, this is a collection for spring. The whole thing was kind of all over the place but without any progression. We started with leather jackets and got to floral dresses, but how? I guess the best and easiest way for me to put it, mostly for the sake of explaining it to myself, is that I just wasn't completely "feeling" the entire collection. But not all of Yohji Yamamoto's shows have to be groundbreakingly conceptual, and that's okay. With the economy, this would be the best possible time to be a bit more commercial, and we all know it won't be permanent.