A new book reveals Yohji Yamamoto’s previously unpublished drawings “Yamamoto Yohji Drawings” features previously unseen sketches discovered in a warehouse in Tokyo

On October 29, Yamamoto Yohji Drawings is released, a volume collecting the unpublished drawings of the Japanese designer. Written by Alexandre Samson, curator at the Palais Galliera, the book consists of one hundred and eighty-three illustrations spread across three hundred and twenty pages, covering the period from his first Paris runway show in 1981 to 1999. The images were personally selected by Yamamoto, with graphic contributions by Peter Saville.

Created for menswear and womenswear collections, the sketches offer a unique opportunity to see fashion through Yamamoto’s eyes. There are coats that seem to catch fire, figures hunched over themselves, garments of an elegance that, in the drawing, dissolves into just a few lines.

Samson describes them as a discovery: hundreds of sheets of paper stored in a box in a Tokyo warehouse. Yamamoto had humbly called them “just drawings” and, as he had anticipated in My Dear Bomb in 2010, the artistic success of the sketches is of no importance. They are better understood as a code, a private language shared between the person who draws and the person who creates the pattern. Those sheets were not intended for anyone, and this is perhaps what tells us the most about Yamamoto and makes this volume so special.