Homage to Azzedine…
This show was about one Master class tailor honoring another.
Despite the differences in style, Azzedine Alaia and Yohji Yamamoto had a lot in common after all.
They both have that obsession of “Black”, and that rigor in their work, sculpting and celebrating the woman’s body. It would be more accurate to qualify them as “Dressmakers”, rather than just “Fashion Designers”.
The long black coats with multiple variations of dramatic collars, the 3 dimensional cubic forms ingeniously constructed to shape the silhouettes, and the leather bustiers which darts have been turned into graphical mosaics of leather patches,beautifully sculpting the waistlines…
Whatever it was, the clothing had to keep it real.
How deconstructed the garment could be, everything in the collection remained wearable.

“Twenty years ago, their paths seemed to run in opposite directions. Yohji Yamamoto, the Japanese, seeking to celebrate the air between the skin and the garment, Azzedine Alaia, the Mediterranean, endeavouring to sculpt a body. A matter of space for one, of millimeter for the other. Shinjuku (Tokyo) to Babsouka, Tunis via Paris (…)
There remains the question loyally asked to women: “May I help you?”. But also the respect their work provokes. “In Japanese, there is an adage that says that opposites form the truth”, says Yohji Yamamoto. Their clothes don’t have a nationality, even if they only speak of the attachment to their origins, to the memory of childhood.”

Extract of “Azzedine Alaia and Yohji Yamamoto in conversation with Laurence Benaim” from A Magazine (2005)