If you have talent and cool in Tokyo today, you show it by opening a select shop on the back streets of the hip shopping district Harajuku, picking and choosing fashions high and low like a DJ mixing tracks. Or better yet, you become a stylist like Sukezane, coordinating outfits for celebrities, playing your pied pipe for the common consumer in Japan's instructional fashion magazines. Those who tough it out designing complain about the lack of government support, or the slavish preference of young Japanese for foreign luxury brands. But these are side effects. Japanese fashion design has lost much of the international status it enjoyed in the 1980s because young Japanese don't want to design like their elders did. They may not want to design at all. "People are saying you don't need designers anymore, that merchandising is enough," says Sanae Kosugi, who as president of Tokyo's prestigious Bunka Fashion Business School is responsible for training many of those designers. No wonder Limi wanted to play bass instead.

But the family business beckoned. When her father offered her the chance to run her own line less than three years after she joined the company in 1996, she snatched at the chance. Limi's debut in 2000 was strong if far from revolutionary, packed with well-crafted designs that mixed cute and cool. Backstage, a proud Yohji gave his daughter words of comfort and wisdom. "When she was just starting her new line, I told her, 'Welcome to hell,'" he says. "Now she is in hell."

You can't accuse Yohji of taking his trade lightly. And for all her detachment, neither does Limi. Her most recent collection is palpably adult compared with the candy-colored juvenilia of most young female fashion in Tokyo. Her dresses and jackets are long and black and finely cut, with traces of classical elegance in their casual styles. Even rich velvet makes an appearance in a red coat that is the collection's gorgeously simple centerpiece. "I wanted to tell young people they can wear velvet, they can wear something really nice," says Limi. "I wanted to make it, even if they don't buy it." She puts out another half-smoked cigarette. "I want to change their way of looking at clothes."

THE REVOLUTION ISN'T OVER
"I design for the woman who does not exist," says Yohji Yamamoto, in his dreamy voice. "The ideal woman." For Limi Yamamoto, it's always been the opposite—the women for whom she designs are very much real. They're the ones she sees on the street, walking to work, shopping, arguing with their boyfriends. They're the ones who might buy her designs—or they might buy Gucci instead. No one calls her a genius, and the only way she's going to Paris is on vacation. But she goes on working, designing against the tide of fashion, with a sincerity and a seriousness that mark her as a true designer—even if she never wished to be one. "I wanted to tell the world that I can make something like this," says Limi, gesturing at the red velvet coat. "That I can make something beautiful." She has.

—With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo

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