Fluence: The Continuance of Yohji Yamamoto - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An elegant, large-format homage to the Yamamoto look

A New York Times critics' pick Best Art Books 2020

This volume celebrates the creative power and style of the great Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. Shot in sensuous black and white, primarily in Tokyo, these previously unpublished images--by photographer Takay--respond to the iconic black designs and silhouettes of Yamamoto's clothing, featuring some of Japan's most accomplished actors, musicians and models, such as stage director Yukio Ninagawa, photographer Daido Moriyama, actress Rie Miyazawa, media artist Yoichi Ochiai and musician Char. The locations hark back to Japan of the 1980s, the end of the Showa era.

The seed for this book was planted many years ago, at the start of Takay's career, when he worked on a Yamamoto project, and came to fruition after he was offered the use of the Yamamoto archive, which spans 40 years of designs. For Takay, Yohji Yamamoto's work exemplifies a strong, avant-garde, masculine style, mixed with a keen Japanese sensibility and elegance.

Takay (born 1973) is a Japanese photographer based in New York, whose photographs have been featured in major fashion publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, L'Uomo Vogue and I-D, as well as in global advertising campaigns. His work has appeared in the Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition Men in Skirts, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum in 2003; the Couture Chanel exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing; and the Met's Spring 2013 Costume Institute exhibition Punk: Chaos to Couture. In 2016 Takay published the monograph Echos.

Review Quotes

Long resident in London and New York, the Japanese photographer Takay returned home to shoot this profoundly beautiful book, documenting three decades of experimental tailoring by the designer Yohji Yamamoto. Takay's subjects trail Mr. Yamamoto's black gowns and suits through undistinguished Tokyo streets; the fashion portraits alternate with images of birds on a power line or Shinjuku at midnight, shot in the grainy black-and-white style called are-bure-boke ("rough, blurred and out-of-focus"). Posing alongside the professional models are several titans of Japanese culture: the actress Rie Miyazawa, fragile and rumpled in a polka-dot gown from 1999; the theater director Yukio Ninagawa, pensive in a thick wool jacket; and even Daido Moriyama, the godfather of postwar Japanese photography, whose portrait here in a three-quarter-length overcoat embodies estranged Tokyo cool.--Jason Farago "New York Times"

Japanese avant-garde fashion maestro Yohji Yamamoto collaborated with photographer Takay to capture the experimental ethos and enduring legacy of the celebrated designer's longstanding conceptual legacy. Expect asymmetry, tonal darkness, and gender fluidity.--David Saric "S Magazine"

Shot in black and white on the streets of Tokyo by fashion photographer Takay, Fluence: The Continuance of Yohji Yamamoto celebrates the powerful influence of great Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. In it, Yamamoto's designs, from 40 years of work, are modelled by some of Japan's best known creatives, blending the energy of the city and its citizens in the long shadows cast by the avant-garde designer.-- "TANK Magazine"