Since the hakama post went down well, I thought I would do another one on
August Sander. Another muse of Yohji's.
Quote:
German photographer. After seven years as a miner and a period of national service, he studied painting in Dresden from 1901 to 1902, which allowed him to approach photography artistically. He had developed an interest in photography through work in photographic firms in Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle and Dresden from 1898 to 1899. In 1901 he went to Linz, where he first worked in the Greif Studio, which he ran from 1902 with his partner Franz Stukenberg as the Studio Sander & Stukenberg, until he founded the Studio August Sander für Kunstphotographie und Malerei in 1904. He sold the studio in 1909 and returned to Cologne, where he ran the Studio Blumberg & Hermann, and in 1910 he founded his own studio in Lindenthal.
At this point Sander started his major project,
Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (which is called Men of the 20th Century in English), with which he was involved until the 1950s. The theme for the project grew out of the portraits he made of Westerwald farmers, in whom he saw the archetypal contemporary man. Building on this, Sander developed a philosophy that placed man within a cyclic model of society. In these terms, the peasant class constituted the basis of society, hence his title for the series of 12 peasant portraits, Stamm-Mappe (see G. Sander, 1980, nos 1–12). The next group, of skilled workers, is the foundation of civic life, from lawyer to member of parliament, from soldier to banker. These are followed by intellectuals: artists, musicians and poets. The cycle closes with the Letzte Menschen, the insane, gypsies and beggars.
Although this cyclic model of society was anything but progressive, Sander came into conflict with the Nazis. The political activities of his son Erich were also held against him, and he had to interrupt work on this project between 1933 and 1939, when he devoted himself mainly to the themes of the Rhine countryside and the city of Cologne. The unusual quality of his portraiture is, above all, its systematic manner; this made the work a well-designed unity, not only in a sociological and philosophical sense, but also in photographic terms.
more at the
MOMA website
August Sander's cyclic model of society can be seen most recently in Yohji's AW12-13 collection. His view of what constituted the archetypal contemporary man is also a definite influence on how Yohji approaches his mens clothing. Made for the everyman and with a rumpled, lived in aesthetic that is free from any airs (even though paradoxically its high cost limits access to it generally and means that one ends up with a higher number of the bourgeois wearing his clothes).
AW12-13 looks with associated archetypes -
Skilled workers (Click to show)
Intellectuals (Click to show)
Letzte Menschen (Click to show)
Yohji has visited the Sanders cyclic model of society quite a few times, but I am too lazy right now to go grab pics and name seasons :P. Spring 2011 are AW99 are the ones that immediately spring to mind though.
In the movie "A Notebook on Cities & Clothes", Wim Wenders talks about how both he and Yohji really like August Sanders and own copies of his seminal work, Men of the 20th Century. It is a book on portraiture and looking at it, one can see why Yohji would be drawn to August Sander's artistic sensibilities, ideas about contemporary man and his work.
Quote:
"Man of the Twentieth Century" was Sander's monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that "[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled," Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people. Although the Nazis banned the portraits in the 1930s because the subjects did not adhere to the ideal Aryan type, Sander continued to make photographs. After 1934 his work turned increasingly to nature and architectural studies. via the
Getty museum
It is also interesting that he got into architectural studies later in his life as Yohji is also pretty interested in architecture, with his issue of A Magazine including a section on the Iraqi-British architect
Zaha Hadid and his clothes have been described as "architectural" by many fashion critics.
Yohji is definitely a designer very interested, and maybe even trapped, in a romantic view of the past "With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future", bringing in designs and views that would be at home in the late 1800s or early 1900s from both the East and the West and putting his own spin on things.
I am very interested in doing more research into the cultural links that Germany and Japan have as I see a lot of fascination with German design, imagery and even words in so many aspects of modern/pop Japanese culture. Would be interesting to see what similarities if any one could dig up from the two nations.
August Sander Images (Click to show)
