This exhibition explores the work of idiosyncratic and ground-breaking designer Yohji Yamamoto. Fabric, he said, ‘is everything’. This deep interest in textiles is at the heart of his approach to design.

Yamamoto became internationally renowned in the early eighties for challenging traditional notions of fashion by designing garments that seemed oversized, unfinished, played with ideas of gender or fabrics not normally used in fashionable attire such as felt or neoprene. Other works revealed Yamamoto’s unusual pattern cutting, knowledge of fashion history and sense of humour. His work is characterised by a frequent and skilful use of black, a colour which he describes as ‘modest and arrogant at the same time’.

This retrospective, experienced through a series of site-specific installations throughout the V&A and beyond, includes Yamamoto’s menswear for the first time. The main exhibition space houses over 60 creations and a multi-media timeline which reveals Yamamoto’s wider creative output.

V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, England, 011 44 20 7942 2000, March 12-July 10 2011