Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo arrived in Paris together in 1981 and were talked about together for years, often as if they were a single phenomenon. But they're quite different designers. Kawakubo is the radical who breaks clothes apart; Yamamoto is the tailor who puts them together in a new way. I find his work some of the most beautiful of the whole decade.

He was born in Tokyo in 1943 and grew up with his mother, a war widow who worked as a dressmaker. He studied law at Keio University, then decided to join her business instead, and trained at Bunka Fashion College. He launched his first label, Y's, in 1972, showed in Tokyo in 1977, and made his Paris debut in 1981. That first Paris show, full of black, oversized, loose clothes, got the same shocked reaction as Kawakubo's, but it quickly won a serious following.

His clothes are built on menswear. He took the materials and cutting of men's suits and coats - wool gabardine, heavy cotton, precise tailoring - and made them for women, but instead of shaping them to show off the body, he cut them loose and let them hang. Jackets were oversized and asymmetric, trousers were wide, coats wrapped around the body, and there was a lot of fluid drape and space between the clothes and the skin. He famously loved black above all, describing it as both modest and arrogant at once, and made it the colour of intellectual chic.

What makes him especially interesting to me is what he was doing to the idea of the "power suit." The power silhouette of the 1980s gave women authority by borrowing masculine shoulders but keeping a fitted, feminine shape, with short skirts and a nipped waist. Yamamoto gave women authority by covering them up. His clothes didn't depend on the wearer's figure, didn't flatter in the usual way, and weren't meant to attract a certain kind of look. For many women - especially creative professionals - that was a far more appealing kind of power, and it's why his clothes were so influential by the late 1980s. He has continued designing in the same spirit ever since, which shows how solid those 1980s ideas were.