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

Recently, we lost renowned progressive fashion designer, Kansai Yamamoto. Yamamoto is best known for this long-term cooperation with David Bowie, specifically the outfits for the Martian rocker’s Ziggy Stardust trip.

On the Fashion United site, there’s a piece about the 2018 Brooklyn Museum night with Yamamoto, done in assistance of the David Bowie Is exhibit.

Here, Yamamoto describes his cooperation with Bowie:

” Unlike me, Bowie was peaceful, shy, however on stage he flips a switch and becomes David Bowie,” says Yamamoto. “Me, I’m constantly that way.” However they shared a love of what the designer calls “radical appearance,” and when asked what they gained from each other, he responds that through Bowie he established his understanding of Western gown while he assisted Bowie analyze Eastern clothes. He concurs that he sees a direct line between what he developed in the 70 s for Bowie and the current discussion on gender and gown. “I approached Bowie’s clothing as if I was creating for a female,” he confesses. “Notification there is no zipper in front.” However he feels happy seeing how the younger generation attending the “David Bowie Is” exhibit can express themselves when compared to the social limitations he came across in Japan 50 years earlier, as a self-taught, broke, designer launching his profession at the age of21 A professional photographer had actually snapped a photo of him walking along London’s Kings Roadway and it was featured on the cover of Life magazine. “I felt every day I was the design in a fashion show and everybody around me were members of the audience,” he states. “There were lot of times, individuals looked at me weird.”

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Images: FashionUnited and FaceMePLS (CC BY 2.0)