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What the modern aristocrat wears

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, Florence, Italy
Monday, Jan 17, 2005, Page 16

"The clothes are so heavy next to the art," Yohji Yamamoto said, sighing, last week at a gala dinner in his honor at this city's historic Palazzo Vecchio. The legendarily pessimistic Yamamoto was referring to an exhibition of his work across the Arno at Palazzo Pitti, where amid the gravy-colored portraits of forgotten aristocrats and ponderous Academic nudes, his rigorously simplified clothes look, in fact, stark and ethereal.

The show was timed to coincide with Pitti Immagine Uomo, the big men's wear trade show held here each January, and the celebratory dinner was given by Leonardo Domenici, the mediagenic mayor of Florence and attended by a motley collection of fashion types and civic notables. It was staged in the vast Renaissance-era Lily Chamber, rarely used for anyone lower in rank than a head of state. Guests merrily tucked into plates of poached fish and glazed vegetables beneath a gilded ceiling and a famous Donatello depicting Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes, not necessarily everyone's idea of a centerpiece. Yamamoto sat amid the crowd and the hum, silently pushing his food around his plate.

A Yohji Yamamoto fashion show at the Satzione Leopolda in Florence, Italy. PHOTO: NY TIMES

In a sense, Yamamoto could be thought of as a world leader, since few in recent history have exerted half as much influence on fashion as he has. It is not so much that his austere and structurally challenging weeds have influenced generations as that, nearly alone among Japanese designers, his aesthetic has survived translation from cult status to the broader marketplace.

Yohji Yamamoto could be thought of as a world leader, since few in recent history have exerted half as much influence on fashion as he has. PHOTO: NY TIMES

Somehow, his Y-3 line of sportswear manages to make yahoos on snowboards look as design-literate as Manhattan art dealers and simultaneously adds a fillip of snowboarder cool to the selfsame art dealers, for whom Yohji Yamamoto clothes are a default uniform.

Correspondences, as the exhibition is called, assembles 80 outfits and spreads them throughout Palazzo Pitti's Galleria d'Arte Moderna, modern here meant to indicate nothing later than the 19th century. Like the blockbuster Dangerous Liaisons show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last spring, Correspondences attempts to introduce liveliness to static collections by staging what some curators pretentiously term "interventions."

Center and above, Yohji Yamamoto fashion is displayed alongside Renaissance art at the Palazzo Pitti in the Galleria D'Arte Moderna in Florence, Italy. PHOTOS: NY TIMES

Clothes plus kitsch cliches equals visual dialogue, goes the thinking, whereas in reality, clothes plus kitsch tends to produce not lively cogitation so much as a separate new genre as dulling to mind as it is to eye. It is a pitfall of which Yamamoto is keenly aware. Seeing so many of what he calls his "back numbers" in one place "feels like punishment to me," he said. "Anyway, for years I hated the idea of a retrospective of my work, since it felt like proof of my mistakes." If punishment it is, Yamamoto is in for plenty more when a major retrospective of his work opens in April in Paris. "I think," Yamamoto added glumly, "it is enough to do this once every 25 years."

"The clothes are so heavy next to the art."

Yohji Yamamoto

That Correspondences happened at all is extraordinary in a sense, since the show's sponsor is the Pitti Immagine Discovery Foundation, the cultural arm of one of Italy's big trade groups. Imagine something like a national polyester board footing the bill for a major Calvin Klein retrospective, and you'll get the idea. "It's natural for us to do things like this in Florence," said Francesca Tacconi, a foundation spokesman. The foundation, she added, "serves as a seismograph and catalyst for the trends that give shape to contemporary thought."

In a way, Tacconi was speaking the truth. If one wanted to gauge where men's fashion is headed, there are worse places to look than at this frenetic trade show held on the grounds of the medieval Fortezza da Basso. More than 800 brands and, it can seem, as many countries are represented at the fair, which typically features more ethnic and national caricatures than an Epcot Center jamboree.

At Pitti Uomo, you can count on the Italians to wear tight pants and smoke (outdoors only now that a new ban is in effect) as if Marlboros were the staff of life. You can rely on Japanese buyers to overexert themselves performing courtesy bows. You can guess that the English will come dressed in the kind of clothes that evoke lager-lout blowouts on Ibiza. And you are guaranteed to find at least one Austrian wearing a Heidi T-shirt, ironically. And, of course, you will see plenty of Americans doing all of the above, more or less at once.

There is a sober side to Pitti Uomo of course, since it is here that one encounters all the major players responsible for the continuing glory of the "made in Italy" label, even though it increasingly comes to mean "assembled in Romania with buttonholes added somewhere near Milan." There are Ermenegildo Zegna and Pal Zileri and Luciano Barbera and Maurizio Corneliani and Giorgio Canali, representatives of what is brightly termed the "upper-casual market" here. There are dozens of companies making sports clothes under labels that no one but retailers bother to differentiate.

Increasingly, though, it is Pitti Uomo that attracts the new names and no-names whose business plans may never bring them to international fame but whose ideas will almost certainly turn up on Italian and American runways, in specialty boutiques and at the virally replicating multibrand stores. It is at Pitti Uomo that one can chart the future of bluejeans. And anyone who thinks that the end is near for treated, roughed-up and overpriced denim had better take a couple of aspirin and lie down.

"The idea is to use them and wear them every day for six months without washing them," said Palle Stenberg, one of the partners in Nudie jeans, a hot new brand whose principals defected from mainstream companies like Levi's and Lee. After six months, the jeans acquire "a really beautiful patina," according to Stenberg, whose clothes are sold in 250 stores throughout Europe and at Fred Segal in Los Angeles. They also, it is fair to say, acquire a distinctive aroma, which is why, Stenberg said, he and his girlfriend closet their clothes separately. "She won't put up with the smell," he said.

Referring to Nudie, one English retailer said: "Too fringe for us." The same buyer also turned up his nose at the hip revisions of traditional snowflake and reindeer ski wear produced by Alprausch, a two-year-old Zurich-based company, and at the strenuously hip vintage-style graphics favored by Jacopo Santa Rossa, the designer for Z Brand, a line started a year back in a mini storage unit outside Pasadena, California.

"There are so many brands now, and they don't put any deepness into what they do," said Santa Rossa, a former designer for Lucky Brand. "It's like giving people always another slice of Grandma's cake," he said. There are others, though, like Santa Rossa, whose involvement does a lot to keep fashion nutty enough to prevent it becoming an unwholesome bore.

With Pitti Uomo begins a month-long cycle that tends to leave even the most dedicated follower of fashion feeling as glutted as a foie gras goose on corporate design agendas. Perhaps the world will never be treated to major retrospectives of designer oddities like Santa Rossa. Maybe there will never be a monograph devoted to the oeuvre of Reinhard Plank, a philosophical hatter ("A hat is like a small house," he claimed) whose duck-billed caps are formed from recycled ladies' headgear. Then again, who knows?

"The last thing I ever intended to be was a famous designer of so-called fashion," Yamamoto remarked at his celebratory dinner. "I only wanted to stay in my mother's dressmaking shop quietly and sew clothes."
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