Yohji Yamamoto changed fashion history forever in 2001 when Y-3 was born making it the pioneer of collabs. More than twenty-two years later adidas and Yohji Yamamoto pushed the boundaries of avant-garde design and sporting innovation. For Fall/Winter 2024, Y-3 explores the intersection between the organic and the synthetic found in hybridized styles.
We visited the showroom during Paris Fashion Week where Stefano Pierre Beruschi, head design director at Adidas Originals, partnerships, and Y-3, walked us through the collection and we picked his brain on why this iconic collaboration stays relevant and impactful today.
“Back in 2002, I went to Selfridges and I saw the first Yohji Yamamoto adidas collab, I was like ‘what?!’ A sports and fashion brand together? It was an interesting concept, an interesting thought process colliding two things, and here we are, twenty-two years later.” Stefan told us.
Today it can feel like collabs are quite saturated, but you will find many Gen X and Millennials holding on to their Y-3 archives, while Gen Z might be discovering it for the time. It is one of the few collabs that has grown into a timeless mainstay, Yohji is something of a legend. Yohji is still very active at Y-3, with Stefano in Tokyo all of the time to meet him and his time. So we had to ask, why has it been so successful?
Showroom photos by Tiago Pestana.
“There’s principles attached to how it is created. Along with the essence that we make sure we are capturing, the parallels between two very different expressions. You can see the collision between the frayed edge and high frequency. He is very sartorial but it’s not your typical tailoring, it’s raw, and there is always one thing that is a little bit off about it. Y-3 hasn’t always been in the forefront, but it is Yohji’s endurance, the way he has stuck with himself as an artist, a creator. We make sure that what we are doing is reinstalling that as our core nature. It might have been lost at some point in the past twenty years, but we are trying to recapture it.”
You can easily wear pieces from ten years ago, and going through the upcoming you can wear pieces easily into the next ten years. For Fall Winter 2024/25 the starting point is things that are invisible in nature like infrared or soundwaves while fluidity runs throughout.
“The things you think are the right way, he will impact the conversations with something adjacent,” Stefano said on working with Yohji. “It’s that level of thinking, when we think something is right, there is this adjacent side that we are all blind to.”
With a color palette of crisp whites and stark blacks, pieces that caught our eye included ultraviolet graphics, elegant knitwear, and experimental executions. However, on closer inspection, you can find detailing like a tie-dye finish that you might have missed the first time or metallic nylon. Performance makes its way into the collection through super strong core outwear offerings drawing on essential patterns or techniques from Yohji archives and reissuing them in performance materials like Gore-Tex, waterproof shells, adidas tech materials in the lightest weight capturing warmth, or fabrics that envelop you inside giving a sense of insulation for the season.
Check out the collection below:
