To level accolades upon Yohji Yamamoto is like, as Leonard Cohen once said about Bob Dylan, “pinning a metal on Mount Everest”. He claims himself to not be an artist, he says fashion has never been an art, yet to deny the artistic quality of his work would be to deny what our eyes can plainly observe. Like an impressionist painter, he exhumes the depth of relatively simple garments (dirty clothes, the Japanese press branded his early work), taking a form and rendering its function secondary to the emotion he choses to evoke. He refuses to do all the work for you, where a passerby sees a wrinkled coat and oversized, strangely buttoned shirt, a man willing to consider the rorschach presented to him may see anything from romanticism to suffering. This foundational concession — that there is no answer to what precisely you’re looking at — has rendered Yohji a favorite of artists and thinkers across the world.

This intarsia knit sweater features the classic Japanese kaiju, Godzilla. Godzilla originally served as a metaphor for nuclear weaponry, and belonged to a quintessentially mid-20th century genre of fiction in which novelists and film directors used their platforms to express anxiety over a post-Hiroshima world and looming Cold War. Other works within this genre include film classics like “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” “Dr Strangelove,” and novels like "Farenheight 451.” Godzilla has since been the subject of countless remakes over a variety of mediums, and has taken on many forms of varying meaning and seriousness, and remains a staple of the science-fiction genre. 

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws.

Tagged size: 3

Shoulder: 17.5in

Pit to pit: 21.5in

Length: 25.5in

Sleeve: 24in