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PARIS, France — Don't get me wrong. Each season, on my way to the Yohji Yamamoto show, I make this joke with friends that I might actually review the collection without seeing it. The ingredients that make the brand, after all, are well known and have endured almost forty years: black, black, and more black, in various stages of sartorial deconstruction.
It's, in fact, what we get each season without that pre-formed review actually writing itself. Fact is, there is always a surprise in the endless repetition at Yohji. What the master of brutalised yet poetic tailoring is able to do within a very narrow repertoire is surprising.
This season, for instance, his posse of soulful brutes came with a brand of decidedly punk panache, complete with leopard prints, long skirts and Yamamoto's trademark insouciance. It made for a beautiful and energetic avalanche of, well, black. Of course, it was repetitive, but then again, forever and ever, black is not a single colour in Yohji's world. It's a whole spectrum.
