A simple toile, the fabric used for making garment patterns, can often be more beautiful than something made in fine fabrics - like a sketch being better than the final painting. So thinks Yamamoto, the renowned Japanese designer whose first collection, shown in Paris in 1981, caused one critic to write that it "looked like leftover scraps from an atomic blast".
His latest collection is at Havana in Donnybrook, Dublin. Though challenging, it has a purity which is now accepted as "pauperism" aesthetics. We saw none of his occasional forays into bright colours, but one was in khaki, a 1945 New Look revival of a full-skirted, tightly belted coat with a skirt beneath puffed out with tulle.
Mostly it was a stark column of black, the long skirts or trousers topped by tightly fitted bodices. On the dressier numbers these were edged with silk fringes. One or two of the full skirts were padded, bunched over the hips and again, they appealed when put with a fitted, high-necked bodice.
A Yamamoto is often distinctive by its asymmetric cut or by the cut-out pieces on a bodice. An extreme example was half a cardigan (two sleeves but no back and only one side of the front), which is used as a fashion feature worn over a plain black dress and has no practical merit at all.
The collection isn't all in toile with the white stitches showing. Some are in fine quality fabrics, like a silk poplin or stretch cottons, but the idea of the improvised garment runs throughout, giving a fresher, imaginative and more individual feel. It is the fusion of east and west.
It can work, but is not easy to show in the perfect way it needs.