"Not what has been seen before - not what has been repeated, instead new discoveries that look to the future" — Rei Kawakubo

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA is the exclusive East Coast venue for Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion, an exhibition of nearly 100 dresses, skirts, gowns and suits that celebrate the ingenuity and innovation of contemporary Japanese fashion designers. Since the early 1980s, designers such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto have reshaped couture as well as popular fashion and launched a revolution that marks the first time a non-Western culture has significantly transformed the global fashion world. Through innovations in form, technique, material and approach, Japanese designers have challenged conventional ideas of beauty and helped recast fashion as a vital and nuanced art form. Co-organized by the Kyoto Costume Institute and Barbican Art Gallery, London, Future Beauty is on view at PEM from November 16, 2013, through January 26, 2014.

"The fashion designers featured in this exhibition are remarkable for their daring visions, bold wit and incisive creativity," said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM's James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Chief Curator and the exhibition's coordinating curator. "Through their designs we are exposed to alternate definitions of beauty, new ways of considering the human form and insight into some of the most provocative artistic minds working today."

The fundamentals of haute couture in Europe and America — highly sexualized fitted forms, balance, finish, invisible tailoring and complementary color and pattern — are noticeably absent from contemporary Japanese fashion. Instead, imperfection, transience, austerity, asymmetry, roughness, simplicity and subtlety are valued. As designer Yohji Yamamoto affirmed, "I think perfection is ugly. Perfection is a kind of order ... things someone forces onto a thing. A free human being does not desire such things." The avant-garde visions featured in Future Beauty carve a new aesthetic path forward, one that bridges tradition and innovation while charting a new understanding of what beauty can be.

In Praise of Shadows

A watershed moment for Japanese fashion occurred at the now legendary Paris catwalk show in 1983 where designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto debuted their black and white collections. Asymmetric and sculptural, Kawakubo and Yamamoto's forms enveloped, rather than revealed, the body in a way that radically rejected the trending obsession with body consciousness and form-fitting silhouettes. Through variability, imperfection and layering, Kawakubo's Autumn/Winter 1983-84 ensemble seen here emphasizes the contrast generated by the textures and looseness of layered fabric. Their "new black" became the "in" color and widely influenced Western designers.

Jun'ichir Tanizaki's influential 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows is often credited for Japanese designers' gravitation toward Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto . Fascinated with shadows as dynamic, shifting spaces, Tanizaki posited that, "the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age."

Tradition and Innovation

After World War II, the development of synthetic and industrial fabrics expanded Japan's legacy of creating sophisticated textiles. New techniques and processes were devised for weaving and dyeing a range of materials — from silk and paper to polyester and stainless steel — resulting in a host of new textures, visual effects and creative possibilities. Junya Watanabe's voluminous honeycomb construction, seen in his Autumn/Winter 2000-01 Techno Couture collection, exemplifies this ultra-modern approach to fashion that unlocked the potential of using fabric as a sculptural material.

Images: Koji Tatsuno, Autumn/Winter 1993-94, Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute, Gift of Mr Koji Tatsuno. Photo by Richard Burbridge.
Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Autumn/Winter 1983-84. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute, Gift of Comme des Garçons Co., Ltd. Photo by Masayuki Hayashi.
Junya Watanabe for Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons, Autumn/Winter 2000-01. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama.

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