Yohji Yamamoto studied at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, graduating in 1969 after first taking a law degree at Keio University in 1966. He worked for his mother, Fumi Yamamoto, a Tokyo dressmaker based in Kabukicho, before launching his own ready-to-wear label, Y’s, in 1972. His Tokyo runway debut followed in 1977.

The work is a study in black wool gabardine and drapery cut away from the body. Oversized coats and asymmetric skirts foreground the seam as ornament, and the silhouette swallows the figure.

The Yohji Yamamoto Paris debut came in 1981, shown the same season as Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons and received by the French press as a single Japanese rupture in the schedule. The clothes were frayed wool, slashed jersey, flat shoes, a palette of black on black. Long jackets had sleeves that hung past the wrist. Trousers gathered at unexpected points, and knitwear was pulled through with holes.

Against the Mugler and Montana shoulder of the early 1980s, Yamamoto’s proposition sat closer to the line later picked up by Martin Margiela and, at a distance, by Phoebe Philo at Céline. The Council of Fashion Designers of America named him International Designer of the Year in 1999. France appointed him Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 2005, followed by Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.

The Y-3 collaboration with Adidas, launched in October 2002 with the spring-summer 2003 collection, extended the main line’s vocabulary of black nylon, oversized track tailoring, and high-shafted sneakers into a standalone label that remains in production. Yamamoto continues to show the Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme and women’s collections in Paris, with Y-3 now into its third decade under his name.

Forty-plus years on from the Paris debut, the house remains the reference point for a tailoring tradition that treats black as a full palette and the back of a garment as its front.