In 1982, the Paris fashion world was blown off its feet. Two designers, who had flown over from Tokyo, used their respective collections to entirely shift the way we think about fashion. Their names are Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, and their black, oversized, distressed garments shown at Paris Fashion Week would go on to change our very understanding of clothes. Channelling the beauty of darkness and poetic destitution, he created enveloping silhouettes in purposefully aged fabrics in only the deepest, darkest shades of black, worn with pallid bare faces, flat shoes, and jauntily uneven hems and finishings. Alongside these two, Issey Miyake was already turning heads with his avant-garde, functional designs that embraced elements from both Western and Japanese fashion. Together, these three designers would reshape the fashion landscape — and their influence on the way we dress, how we shop, and what we consider as ‘designer clothes’ can still be felt today. 

In this week’s episode of the i-Dentity podcast, we discuss how terms like ‘Hiroshima’s Revenge’, ‘Fashion Kamikaze’ and ‘Japanese Invasion’ were used by some of the Western fashion press to describe these designers' work when they first appeared on the runways of Paris, and how Yohji and Rei’s new black-clad disciples were labelled as “crows”, and their “funereal shrouds” billed as “Fashion’s Pearl Harbour”, and Yohji and Rei as “Rag Pickers”. 

It would take years before the world would come to appreciate these designer’s impact on fashion history. They spoke to a new generation of fashion enthusiasts in the West who rejected the polished look of consumerism in the 1980s — a generation who experienced the immense societal changes around youth culture and subculture first-hand. Their boiled wools, cut-outs, ragged edges, tears and knots paved the way for a vision of ‘grunge’ long before it leapt from Seattle to MTV in the 90s and became a staple of wardrobes around the world. Their deconstruction of fabrics and finishings established aesthetic values that would colour fashion’s future: grungy teenagers and goths rifling through thrift stores; Belgian deconstructionists, such as Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester; the countercultural darkness of Rick Owens and a generation of image-makers and designers who have archival Yohji and Comme des Garcons pinned to their mood boards. Almost half a century on from their first collections, their work has infiltrated all aspects of fashion today – from shop design, to publishing, exhibition-making and, of course, the way we dress.

This week, Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director of i-D, speaks to esteemed fashion historian and Director and Curator of The Fashion Institute of Technology, Valerie Steele, about the moment that Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohjo Yamamoto merged Japanese dress with Western fashion, and the ideas that would influence their early work. Fashion consultant and CEO of PR Consulting Paris Nathalie Ours, who started working for Yohji Yamamoto in the late 1980s, remembers what it was like seeing his work for the first time, while Tiffany Godoy, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue Japan takes us through these designers’ countercultural origins and their contributions to the industry at large.