#i love japanese fashion

”Just as Lucas borrowed plot points and characters from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies, the costumes were clearly taking cues from Japanese traditional dress.

“It is distinctively different from the whole Western fashion tradition, and that’s an important thing to try and get a sort of ‘alien’ look,” Steele explains of the Japanese influence. “So the fact that it’s flowing, it’s sort of long, T-shaped garments, and sort of stylized armor, as opposed to clothing that is sort of tailored and fitted to the body.”

Not coincidentally, it was at that very moment that an emerging class of Japanese avant-garde designers were beginning to toy with their country’s folk costume in a movement that would soon reverberate in the Western world’s fashion capitals. Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Kansai Yamamoto, and Issey Miyakewere experimenting with surreal and cerebral shapes and bulbous gatherings of fabric that resemble the fresh, outer-world look of Star Wars, with perhaps less threatening results. (Yohji Yamamoto debuted his first collection in Tokyo the year of Star Wars’ premiere, and the others began showing in Paris in the early 80s. The group would be immortalized in a 1983 New Yorker article by Kennedy Fraser prophetically titled “The Great Moment.”)

“It’s hard for me to believe it was entirely accidental because if you think about that particular period right when Star Wars came out, that was right when Japan ruled the world,” Steele says. “The Japanese economy was on top of the world, they were taking over all kinds of companies, and I think there is definitely a hint of an idea that Japan was kind of like this evil empire. So whether consciously or unconsciously, [Mollo] is picking up on Japanese themes in dress for the costuming.””

-FromVanity Fair by Rachel Tashjian 

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