Milan | Transformation, avant-garde, freedom. “Yohji Yamamoto: Letter to the Future” marks a new chapter in the exhibition programming of Galleria 10·Corso·Como, conceived by Tiziana Fausti and dedicated to the culture of fashion, its crossings of aesthetics, and imaginaries. From May 16th to July 31st, the Milanese space exhibits twenty-five garments by the Japanese designer, an important figure in the fashion world who has challenged the canons of garment structure with the avant-garde traits of his pieces, inviting fashion to reflect on new possible silhouettes.
This is a special exhibition project, for the first time in Italy, by the emblematic designer and poet of black, which traces, like calligraphy, a letter to the future: an imaginative declaration that cuts through space in a parade conceived as a single installation. Curated by Alessio de’Navasques – lecturer in Fashion Archives at Sapienza University of Rome – the exhibition presents archive pieces from the Yohji Yamamoto Collection from different epochs and seasons, from 1986 to 2024, defining the designer’s ambivalent and poetic relationship with time in an asynchronous flow of shapes, asymmetries, and materials.
The garments are displayed, without scenic artifice, on the sartorial busts of the Bonaveri Atelier collection, similar to those on which they originally came to life: thus, a path of correspondences is traced between his reflections on the sense of the future – printed on the walls – and a selection of archive pieces, demonstrating his relationship between body and garment in overcoming chronological dimension. Bonaveri busts accompany textures and lines, enhancing garments and forms by bringing out the black color, a cosmic hue mainly used and appreciated by the designer.
In the volumes shaped by Yohji Yamamoto, there seems to be no beginning and end anymore, because the air circulates between the body and the fabric, and the garment seems to breathe without the constraints of a predefined structure. At the center of the exhibition, the idea of welcoming imperfection for every form, and the experimentation of volumes and fabrics – worked or left to slide, draped or sculptural – motifs that have revolutionised the relationship between garment and person: for a freedom that looks to the future, without time constraints.
“After major retrospectives such as the one at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2011, it is an honor to have the unique opportunity to host a project by Yohji Yamamoto that looks to the future and is vibrant on the contemporary, dedicated to younger generations. Yamamoto returns to Italy after almost two decades, and it is significant for us that he is in Milan, precisely at 10 Corso Como, where he was one of the seminal authors in defining the avant-garde and research identity of this place,” says Tiziana Fausti.
