There’s a changing of the guard in fashion and culture. Gen-Z creators are pushing the conversation forward in ways both awe-inspiring and audacious. Our latest project, Youthquake, invites you to discover how these artists, musicians, actors, designers, and models are radically reimagining the future.
True originals are hard to come by, but Aoi Yamada certainly qualifies. The Tokyo-based 21-year-old self-described “dancer, model, and expresser” is instantly recognizable. Not just because of her movements, but also owing to her avant garde performance looks, which could be anything from a leotard printed with Matsumoto Castle to a hairstyle that looks like a thatched Japanese roof. This sui generis effect makes her hard to forget. Likely, that’s why she’s already worked with Stella McCartney, modeled for Fred Perry, and, most notably, performed a solo dance at the closing ceremony of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo last summer. For the latter, she wore a bedazzled headpiece and a jacket made of paper thin strips of green and brown fabric; when she spun, she looked like a brush in a carwash.
Yamada started dancing when she was around five years old, trying out different genres before realizing that she was really just in it for the fun. “I enjoyed wearing my favorite clothes and dancing with my favorite music,” Yamada says. Her love of fashion also dates back to her childhood. In elementary school, she remembers buying new issues of Vogue and experimenting with photo shoots, using her mother’s clothes. “I gathered up her clothes, coordinated them, and took a picture of it in the middle of the rice field in front of her house,” she says. “The colors and combinations I saw when I was little, I feel that it is unconsciously affecting the present.”
At 15, she attended a dance specialty high school in Tokyo before meeting her current manager two years later. Then, she started to model and perform in music videos, stage performances, and at Basel World in 2018 and 2019. Still, she considers the Olympic performance her big break—and really, who could ask for a more global stage?
There is a certain quality in Yamada’s work that resists definition. She calls her practice “expression,” rather than “dance,” a decision she made after seeing images of the model Sayoko Yamaguchi and Butoh dancers. (Butoh, a Japanese style of dance first performed in 1959, is performed by dancers with shaved heads covered in white powder, with the focus on slow or erratic movements rather than leaps and kicks.) In a recent Instagram reel, Yamada performs to the sound and flashing lights of a clicking camera. Dressed in green pants and a turtleneck, topped with a pink robe and gloves, she mimes sweeping and posing for the camera, walking back and forth. The clothes give the performance a dizzying, almost hypnotic effect.
In her new video for Vogue, two Yamadas perform a stop-motion routine that turns into a kind of dance-off. Both are dressed in leotards befitting an ice-skater, accessorized with gloves, gigantic, spherical sleeves, and platform shoes. Oh, and they are bald, perhaps a nod to Butoh dancers. Trippy and surreal, the video exemplifies both her approach to performance and her trippy sense of self-expression. As Yamada says, fashion allows her to “put her soul in a container called Aoi Yamada.”
Choreography & Music by Aoi Yamada
Art Director: Midori Kawano
Photographer: Akiko Isobe
Stylist: Chie Ninomiya
Hair & Makeup: Noboru Tomizawa
Hair & Makeup Assistant: Mari
Location: Hotel New Akao
Special thanks: Oi-chan, Project Atami