Japanese anti-fashion takes off from Paris

Press, 28 November 1983, Page 16

Japanese anti-fashion takes off from Paris

By

JOAN HARRISON,

in Paris

Japanese dress designers are proliferating in Paris. There are now 10, and they like to drape their black, shapeless clothes in tattered remnants on unmade-up models with streaks of dirt on their faces, and deliberately messy hair. The formula works. Kenzo, who started out 13 years ago with a tiny shop called Jungle Japs,'finished up the Paris shows recently by giving an all-night party with fireworks at the chateau of Maison Lafitte, a little bash that cost him a reputed $200,000.

As well as fashionable tatters, he has always produced some clothese with class and distinction. His latest collection — long, slim and colourful — got a big ovation.

Long and slim was also the kenynote for Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld, whose perfection challenges Japanese deshabille.

For the first time the Chanel look has been made up in blue denim, suits and

sleeveless dresses with impeccable Chanel cut overstitched with red and trimmed with gold buttons, and the Chanel symbol sewn on to the pockets. It has also taken Lagerfeld to think up Chanel sports clothes as well — outfits for tennis, riding, shooting, golf, swimming, polo — comfortable, but again with the Chanel cut.

If the Japanese clothes seem such a far cry from all this, they cannot be dismissed as anti-fashion.

Neither are they related to the British scene of tribal dressing up, like the punks or mods.

What the Japanese are trying to impose — a mission in which they have to a certain extent succeeded — is the cover-up look of eccentric design and texture, using 3. woman’s body like an artist’s canvas.

All those baggy jeans that have now become so popular started with the Japanese.

Black for summer, black for everything. The capes and flat boots to be seen in all the streets this autumn came originally from the Japanese — Yamamato, Koshini, Issy Miyake. So when the Japanese Comme les Garcons shows what appears to be a tidal wave of black shrouds caught up here and there with a bit of elastic, and Yamamato designs Droopy the Dwarf coats with sleeves longer than the coats themselves, very few fashion professionals are going to laugh it off as so much nonsense.

Indeed, when a French stylist such as Jean Paul Gaultier shows his collection on real dwarfs and; fat models, as he did foigHhe

collections who can say that Yoshi Yamamato — showing gloves without fingers, tights without feet, and handbags slung across the back of the neck — is eccentric? Copyright — London “Observer” Service.