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the impact of Ziggy Stardust. Yamamo-
to did not disappoint. Bowie would
walk on stage in a white cape embla-
zoned with Japanese kanji letters and
underneath would be wearing a daring-
ly short kimono cut just below his groin.
The designer’s personal favourite
creation for Bowie was the “Tokyo Pop”
patent leather black and white jumpsuit
with bulbous bowed legs that un-
snapped along the sides. “What I
created was rather planar compared to
European clothes. I designed them,
figuring out a way so that he looked
larger than his real size or more solid,
like costumes of Noh or Kabuki [classi-
cal Japanese dance-drama].” Bowie and
Yamamoto shared a love of Japanese
theatre. In particular Bowie wanted touse the technique of hikinuki, where
one costume is dramatically stripped
off, revealing a different outfit under-
neath. The technique was perfectly
suited to Aladdin Sane.
Kansai Yamamoto was born in the
city Yokohama, in Japan, in 1944, one of
three sons. His parents divorced when
he was seven and his upbringing was
studious. He enrolled to study civil
engineering at the city’s university, but
switched to read English at Nippon
University.
A trip to the jungles of Papua New
Guinea changed his life. On his return
he was haunted by images of the col-
ourful birds he had seen on his treks.
Obsessed by the incongruously clash-
ing colours of their feathers, he dropped
out of university in 1965 after realising
that all he wanted to do was design
clothes that might recreate something
as beautiful. He began to study fashion
at the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo
and was apprenticed at the ateliers
of the designers Junko Koshino and
Hisashi Hosono. He won prizes for his
creations and started his own company
in 1971.
Over the next 20 years, Yamamoto’s
opulent fashion shows were popular on
the catwalks of London, New York and
Paris. He would often bring his young
daughter Mirai with him on his travels.
An actress, she survives him. By the
early 1990s he realised that he was out
of step with the grungier, edgier aes-
thetic that would characterise music
and fashion in the early part of that
decade. He presented his final collec-
tion in 1992.
Instead he started to curate what he
called “super shows”, live events that
combined music, fashion, dance, acro-
batics and traditional Japanese theatre.
The Kansai Super Show Hello! Russia
event in Moscow’s Red Square in 1993
attracted a crowd of 120,000.
He returned to fashion in later years,
creating a modern version of the kimo-
no that helped to revive interest in the
Japanese garment.
The David Bowie Is exhibition at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in
London in 2013 sold his style to a new
generation and signalled long overdue
homage to a designer who had influ-
enced the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier,
Alexander McQueen and John Galli-
ano. The V&A also put on a live fashion
show dedicated to Yamamoto’s designs,
Fashion in Motion: Kansai Yamamoto,
which featured creations by the latest
generation of digital textile printers. He
also created outfits for Elton John, Ste-
vie Wonder and Lady Gaga, who, rarely
guilty of subtle understatement herself,
described him as a genius.
If he enjoyed his fashion renaissance
to full multicoloured effect, he had one
big regret. He and Bowie had discussed
collaborating on one final spectacular
“super show” in which Yamamoto en-
visaged the singer performing from a
hot-air balloon. After Bowie suc-
cumbed to cancer it was not to be, but
even Yamamoto would have struggled
to eclipse the impact of their gender-
bending collaboration in 1973.Kansai Yamamoto, fashion designer, was
born on February 8, 1944. He died of
acute myeloid leukaemia on July 21,
2020, aged 76Obituaries
Kansai Yamamoto
Influential Japanese fashion designer known for styling David Bowie and creating some of Ziggy Stardust’s most flamboyant outfits
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES; ALEJANDRO GARCIA/SHUTTERSTOCKWith Bowie in Japan in 1973, and in 2017 with the “Tokyo Pop” jumpsuit
beat sense of humour. Bowie for his part
recognised a kindred spirit.
Yamamoto was as much an icono-
clast in Japan as Bowie was in Britain. In
defiance of his country’s traditionally
minimalist approach to fashion design,
Yamamoto was inspired by the Japa-
nese concept of Basara, meaning “ex-travagance, eccentricity and
excess” as well as a “rebellious
spirit in extreme beauty”. He
said that to him colour was
oxygen and in expressing his
saturated palette he stole from
his country’s history to create
vivid motifs inspired by Irez-
umi tattoos, imperial robes and
the extravagant colours of the
Azuchi-Momoyama period.
The pair began collaborating imme-
diately on new outfits for the tour that
would continue until Bowie announced
the death of Ziggy Stardust in July 1973.
By then, Bowie had launched his next
alter-ego Aladdin Sane and had been
prudent enough to retain the fashion
designer who had helped to maximiseWhen Kansai Yamamoto first saw
David Bowie descending to the stage on
a disco ball, he felt a physical sensation
that was like a “chemical reaction”.
It was 1973. Because a friend had
pleaded with him to stop what he was
doing in Tokyo and come to New York,
the Japanese designer had taken a 13-
hour flight and then rushed from JFK
airport to a front-row seat at Radio City
Music Hall. When Yamamoto saw
Bowie wearing one of his colourful
outfits, he thought the long journey had
been worth it.
“He was wearing all black and then
all of a sudden that disappeared, and he
was wearing full colour. It was very
dramatic, and the audience all rose to
their feet, so there was a standing ova-
tion right at the beginning... I found
David’s aesthetic and interest in tran-
scending gender boundaries shocking-
ly beautiful. It felt like the beginning of
a new age.”
Yamamoto would go on to play a full
part in ushering in this new age. Among
the outfits that he created for Bowie’s
stage shows were the one-legged leotard
with the zig-zag pattern that made the
singer resemble a multicoloured lizard
as he slithered about the stage while, in
the words of Ziggy, “making love to his
ego”. In such designs, Bowie could sing
with full abandon lyrics reinforcing the
notion that he was anything but human:
“I’m an alligator, I’m mamma-pappa
coming for you; I’m a space invader, I’ll
be a rock’n’rollin’ bitch for you.”
Hordes of teenage fans screamed in
adoration, but a generation of
nascent fashion designers, pop
performers and other creatives
watched more cerebrally in
deep fascination at the fusion of
Bowie’s camp posturing and
Yamamoto’s garish costumes.
Yamamoto had been drawn
into Bowie’s ambit when the
young designer staged a trium-
phant debut at London Fash-
ion Week in 1971. Thought to be
the first time a Japanese de-
signer had shown a collection
in London, the shiny silky gar-
ments in jarring shades and
sculptural orientally themed
outfits were hailed by Harpers
& Queen as “a spectacular coup
de theatre”. The magazine fea-
tured a female model in one of
Yamamoto’s outlandishly
frilled dresses on its cover.
Bowie bought a few pieces
from Yamamoto’s show from a
shop on the Kings Road. They
formed a prominent part of his
fast-shifting gallery of outfits
as the Ziggy Stardust tour got under
way in January 1972. By the time Yama-
moto flew to New York, Ziggy Stardust
was a sensation. After the show the two
men met. Yamamoto, who had a taste
for spangly gold suits and a flamboyant
personality to match, was curious to
find that off stage Bowie was an ex-
tremely shy person with a gentle, off-
Yamamoto was as much
an iconoclast in Japan as
Bowie was in Britain
W t e s s o s h v u t
under Azuchi-M