Deconstruction and the Japanese Avant-Garde

Most of the construction entries on this site are about how to make clothes more finished and more controlled - boning, interfacing, shoulder pads, neat closures. This one goes the other way. When Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto showed in Paris in the early 1980s, the way their clothes were made was just as shocking as how they looked.

The simplest technique is leaving things unfinished. Hems were left raw or cut unevenly, seams were turned to the outside so their stitching and allowances showed, and linings or interfacing might peek out. In Western dressmaking, all of this was a sign of poor workmanship. In their hands, it was deliberate: a way of showing how a garment was made, rather than hiding it. Kawakubo's holey knitwear took it further, with sweaters knitted on machines adjusted to drop stitches so the holes were built in, not the result of wear.

Just as important was a different way of cutting. Instead of starting from a fitted Western block with darts shaping the bust and waist, many of their clothes started from flat, rectangular, or unusual pattern pieces, closer to the Japanese kimono tradition, which wrapped, folded, and tied around the body. Garments might have extra openings, sleeves in unexpected places, or several ways to be worn. Hems were asymmetric, and volume sat in odd places. Fabrics were often washed, crumpled, or boiled to make them look lived-in, and black dominated, which made the cut and texture stand out more than colour.

The effect was to question what a "finished" garment actually is. Why should a hem be straight, or a seam hidden? Why should clothes follow the body's curves? The Western tradition of fitted construction - which runs all the way back through the site's Victorian corsetry and 1950s boned bodices - suddenly looked like one choice among many. The ideas spread fast: the Belgian designers who emerged in the mid-to-late 1980s, including Martin Margiela, whose first collection came in 1988, took deconstruction further still, and it became one of the key approaches of 1990s fashion. For home sewists, I think it's liberating to know about: some of the most admired clothes of the 1980s were made by designers who decided that the rules of neat finishing were optional.