FAMILY BUSINESS While Yohji Yamamoto changed fashion in the early 1980s, daughter Limi struggles for recognition

Design by Destiny
Limi Yamamoto wants to follow her famous father as a designer. But the Japan of his time is no more

By Bryan Walsh

Here's what you need to know about Limi Yamamoto: she never wanted to become a fashion designer. Growing up rebellious in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, Limi dreamed, when she dreamed at all, of playing bass guitar in a rock band. But here she is in her wood-paneled studio in Tokyo, surrounded by outfits from her most recent collection: ruffled black skirts, well-tailored white blouses, chunky gray street shoes that read "LIMI feu" on their tongues, the name of her fashion label. Hard work helped bring her here, but in keeping with her diffident start, Limi's ambitions seem modest. She knows she needs to present in Europe to be considered a serious designer, but Japan is as far as she'll probably go, and that's all right. "I don't have the dream to go to Paris," Limi says. She adds another half-smoked cigarette to her ashtray. "I'm not trying to get the same kind of name my father did."

That would be Yohji Yamamoto, fashion's man in black, a designer no one could accuse of lacking artistic ambition. When Yohji and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons introduced their radically austere designs to Paris in 1981, they brought the shock of the new to an industry that was marinating in miniskirts, yuppie glitz and bulky shoulder pads. "It was very revolutionary," says Yumiko Hara, a Tokyo-based fashion director. "It definitely established a new kind of beauty." There were critics who rejected the early Yohji aesthetic—the experimental cutting, the stern models and the black, black, black—but the Paris newspaper Libération got its headline right: "French Fashion Has Found Its Masters: the Japanese." Yohji and Kawakubo—along with Issey Miyake, who had debuted in the 1970s—became icons of global style. "Yohji found the truth of clothes," says Françoise Moréchand-Nagataki, a French expert in Japanese fashion who knows the designers. "It was so beautiful."

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But the revolution would be brief. In the years since, no new Japanese designer has managed to achieve the influence of the big three. The end of the bubble economy is partly responsible, but something in the nature of the industry in Japan has changed. In a country where the fashion sense of a stylist trumps the earned creativity of a designer, where marketing beats originality, there is little room for new creators who seek more than mere merchandise out of their designs. Tokyo may be the most fashionable place on the planet—witness the collision between the pricey boutiques of Omotesando and the do-it-yourself street looks of nearby Harajuku—yet scant interest is shown in the work of young Japanese who would sit in their studios and dream new clothes, as Yohji Yamamoto once did. No one knows that better than daughter Limi. "The 1980s are never going to happen again," she says. "In this world, it's difficult for anyone to create anything that brilliant."

STYLE RULES
"He looks like Christ," Moréchand-nagataki says, and she's right, were Christ a heavy-smoking, black-belt-holding Japanese who'd made it to the age of 61. It's the eyes she means, deep and steady, black as the outfit Yohji Yamamoto is wearing in his factory-like Tokyo studio. Lately those eyes look tired too. A pair of gilded celebrations of his long career were held this past winter in Paris and Florence, cementing Yohji's reputation as one of the 20th century's iconic designers, not that he needed any help on that score. "I hate retrospective exhibitions," he says. "They remind me of so many mistakes, so many sufferings. I feel like I am very old."

If Yohji is feeling his age, it hasn't affected his productivity—only two years ago he added another line, a sportswear collaboration with Adidas called Y3. But while Yohji and his contemporaries were driven to create, many in the younger generation seem to treat design as just another freeter job. "These days if you want to become a designer, you can become a designer like that," says stylist Tomoki Sukezane. "You design something, you become a designer. If it doesn't work, you try something else. Maybe you become a DJ." The designer as tortured, epoch-changing artist is out; the designer as trend-spinning dilettante is in. "You don't have to try so hard," says Sukezane. One of the most popular brands in Tokyo today is Samantha Thavasa, which has 77 shops throughout the country and produces pricey handbags beloved by many young Japanese women. Thavasa's big designer? Nicky Hilton, the studious one of the famous sisters. Trying hard is so 25 years ago.

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