Fashion Designer Yohji Yamamoto Says Work Is a 'Prison' - WSJ

Yohji-san has developed a definition of what’s beautiful that’s his and his alone — that your clothes protect you, sure, but in doing so, they hint at the soul within and insist on your humanness.

NC: Boringly, my creativeness is in no way pathological. I work very hard, every day, and on some level it’s a dogged nine to five slog, and if it seems like my output is greater than your average musician or whatever it is I am, it’s because I put in more hours. It’s as simple as that.

That is not to say that on occasions I don’t enter into that wo... See more

When people ask me: Who are you? What do you do? And I tell them — I walk, I write, I photograph, I make books, I run a membership program. Their suspicion is plainly visible: No, but what do you do to survive ? As if the soul itself wasn’t a thing to be nourished. This is survival, I want to say. But instead I say: And from those activities I make... See more