Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, a comprehensive survey of avant-garde Japanese fashion features more than 100 costumes by original designers including Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto as well as younger designers influenced by popular culture and the dynamic street life of Tokyo.

This exciting exhibition, on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), highlights the tremendous innovation of Japanese fashion designers from the early 1980s to the present who revolutionized the way we think of fashion today. The designs reflect a range of influences from Japanese aesthetics, reinterpretations of Western couture, punk aesthetics and Japanese street fashion.

"The exhibition shows how Japanese fashion design launched itself on the world stage in the 1980s. Japanese fashion designers at that time developed breathtaking aesthetic positions that subsequently influenced a younger generation of Western designers including Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Alexander McQueen".
~~~Catharina Manchanda, SAM's Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion

Comme des Garçons (Rei Kawakubo)
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Rei Kawakubo
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Junya Watanabe, Comme des Garçons
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Junya Watanabe
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Yohji Yamamoto
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Yohji Yamamoto
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Mintdesigns
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Kosuke Tsumura
Courtesy Kyoto Costume Institute

Matohu
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Issey Miyake
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Hanae Mori
Photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion is on exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.

June 27 - September 8, 2013

Courtesy Seattle Art Museum

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