Kansai Yamamoto

was a Japanese fashion designer, most influential during the 1970s and 1980s.

Early life and career

Kansai was born in 1944 in Yokohama, Japan and he raised in Gifu City, Japan. He focused on civil engineering in high school, and majored in English at the Nippon University until he dropped out in 1965 to focus on fashion.

Yamamoto's work displayed an aesthetic of "wild maximalism". It has been described as "transgressive excess" and the "opposite" of the concept of wabi-sabi.

In 1971, he opened his own company, Yamamoto Kansai Company, Ltd., Tokyo. His first collection debuted the same year in London and the United States at Hess's Department Store in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which was renowned for many avant-garde collections. He was the first Japanese designer to have a show in London. Kansai became famed for creating androgynous and futuristic stage costumes for David Bowie – most notably for his Ziggy Stardust Tour. His 1975 debut in Paris was followed by the opening of his Kansai Boutique in 1977. He received the Tokyo Fashion Editors award in 1977.

In the early Nineties, after two decades of showing and selling his avant-garde collections in London, Paris and New York, Yamamoto took a hiatus from the fashion world to focus on live entertainment events. His Super Shows, as he called them, combined elements of music, dance, acrobatics, traditional Japanese festivals and other spectacles, and were performed around the world, from Vietnam and India to Russia and Japan. The first such event, in Moscow’s Red Square in 1993, drew a crowd of 120,000.

Later career

In 1999, he and Junko Koshino created a modern version of the kimono, reviving interest in this classical fashion. He is also known for his avant-garde kimono designs, including ones worn by Bowie. In 2009, a major retrospective of Yamamoto's work was exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yamamoto designed the Skyliner train, unveiled in 2010, that connects Japan's Narita Airport with central Tokyo. The same year he held a smaller scale fashion show at Tokyo, then through Kansai's own official account later.