Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A

Yohji Yamamoto is one of our favourite designers, not just for his innovative cutting and detailing but also for showing up in Paris in the early eighties and shocking folk. Daft as it seems now the the things that upset people were big shapes, head to toe black and flat shoes on girls!
 At the V&A's Yamamoto exhibition you can watch videos of his early Paris shows, the clothes are unconventional (particularly for the time) you can see that the models of the eighties don't quite know how to deal with them. In later shows Yohji starts to makes his mark and soon hits his stride with non models and unconventional catwalk presentations- a celebrated one being AW04 featuring Madness doing a bit of a dance and Terry Hall looking pretty cool and very grumpy.
 Very little is in a vitrine here so you can get up close and examine how the clothes are put together. We love Yamamoto's use of "crafty" methods like tie die, hand knitting, stencilling and felting, the results are highly engineered and thankfully not hippyish. Take pleasure in the plain trims: buttons, YKK zips and the total lack of branding and bling. Although dating back to the early eighties many of the garments are timeless, go with a friend and play guess the year- we were wildly out with some pieces.

 The only disapointment for us was with some of the menswear exhibits - there were not enough of them and some had aged badly (nasty embroidery on suiting!). One of the other things we love Yohji for is black and navy our iconic Yamamoto men's look would be a big navy suit and there isn't one here. Every man in the "creative industries" in the 80's had one as far as we remember.