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In his essay 'Notebook on Clothes and Cities' of 1997, the filmmaker Wim Wenders wrestles with his anxieties about the speed and fractured nature of modern city life, where with little compunction we change our clothes, our tastes, our opinions, our fashions and our identities.1 Who are we, he asks, anguishing about the disjuncture between fashionable image making and identity? How do we recognise ourselves? He finds some kind of answer to his question in the first experience he had of wearing a jacket and shirt by designer Yohji Yamamoto. In this outfit he had the strangest feeling that his childhood, his father and the future had fused, and that he had actually become himself. 'In the mirror I saw ME, of course, only better: more 'me' than before ... In them, I was Myself.' Comforted by Yamamoto's garments, he felt that the essence of past memories was actually woven into the fabric of the coat and that he had thereby achieved, not his identity but his real self, linked inextricably to his own familial past.
When one encounters Japanese designer clothing, not as someone wearing them, but in the rarefied context of an exhibition such as Tokyo Vogue - Japanese/Australian Fashion, the possibility of discovering other aspects of the multifarious meanings of dress is diminished; and in this case garments were not subjected to a full critical examination within the context of late 20th century theorising about dress. This was an important exhibition in Brisbane, but the museum environment imposed its own rhetoric or artifice on the many exquisite fashions, and inevitably they remained one-sided aesthetic objects, somehow distant from any wearer's needs, identity and, indeed, body. In... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline