Kansai Yamamoto
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Mirai Yamamoto (daughter)
- Yusuke Iseya (half brother)
Kansai Yamamoto | |
|---|---|
| 山本寛斎 | |
 | |
| Born | 8 February 1944[1] |
| Died | 21 July 2020 (aged 76) |
| Occupations | Designer, Event producer[3] |
| Relatives |
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| Website | kansai-inc |
Kansai Yamamoto (山本 寛斎, Yamamoto Kansai; 8 February 1944 – 21 July 2020) was a Japanese fashion designer, most influential during the 1970s and 1980s.
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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.[2] He apprenticed at ateliers of designers Junko Koshino and Hisashi Hosono while studying fashion on his own. He was awarded the Soen prize by the Bunka Fashion College in 1967.[1]
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.[5]
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.[6] Kansai became famed for creating androgynous and futuristic stage costumes for David Bowie – most notably for his Ziggy Stardust Tour.[7][8][9][10] 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.[1] He presented his final collection for fall/winter of 1992, although he kept lending his name to licensed products ranging from eyeglasses to tableware.[11] After that he began a career as an event producer, notably for events he titled "Super Shows". As Kelly Wetherille writing for WWD puts it:[12]
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.
