Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion........ @ The Barbican

As part of furthering my knowledge and investigating other influences in fashion I decided to visit an exhibition at the Barbican in London.

This exhibition is the first European exhibition to comprehensively survey avant-garde Japanese fashion from the 1980s to now.

Designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto have had an enormous impact on the world’s couture in the late 20th Century. Their techniques challenged Western notions of beauty and redefined previously established notions of fashion.

“The tight silhouettes of Western couture were jettisoned into new fluid shapes [by Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto],” Kate Bush, head of art galleries at the Barbican, said.

“Out went the magnificent ornament and extravagant techniques of the post-war tradition and in came a stark, monochrome palette and an entirely new decorative language.”

The new exhibition, which is curated by fashion historian Akiko Fukai, explores the work of these three designers in relation to Japanese art, culture and costume history.

I really enjoyed this exhibition as it visually communicated the notably brilliant designs, and the way in which they were influenced to create these pieces.

The garments were free standing within the exhibition so you were able to get quite up close and personal to inspect the sheer skill and high levels of workmanship it had taken to create these fabulous garments. I loved the way that they have so successfully manipulated different fabrics to create such fantastic and avant-garde designs, with such inventive construction.

Some of the designs were of course very out there and wacky but still had undertaken so much skill to create them. The exhibition showed the designers progression from there past works up to their current pieces.