Y-3 Spring 2024 Menswear Collection

You know how it’s impossible to read a book that was the basis for a film the same way you would have had you not seen the movie first? It’s equally hard to emphasize the magnitude and impact of Y-3 on fashion to those who didn’t experience it first hand.

We take for granted today how different the fashion and apparel industries were in 2002, the year Yohji Yamamoto approached Adidas with the idea of creating a bridge between ready-to-wear and active sports. The business was much more siloed then, and collaborations weren’t commonplace the way they are today. And let’s face it, as one of the pioneers of the Japanese Wave with a cult following of black-clad fans, Yamamoto was an unlikely candidate for a crossover concept.

What gives longevity to this marriage of sport, fashion, and science is that it goes beyond a one-to-one ratio of exchange—transferring an artwork onto fabric, say. Instead it is a true and emotional dialogue between companies who have achieved a kind of golden mean between performance and panache, technology and artisanality.

The spring collection gives a name, “contranatural,” to a theme that is at the core of the brand; the meeting of the natural and synthetic. Rust dyes are used in a lineup that also makes use of adidas’s proprietary tech materials, explained Adidas’s Stefano Pierre Beruschi over Zoom.

If the silhouettes weren’t pushed as much as they were for fall, the proportions grew. Geometry replaced the New Look–ish curves of last season; balancing the workwear was the poetic use of draping. The team embraced fashion’s continuing obsession with cargo pockets, but in a non-standard way; their shapes and proportions were not uniform. Elements from Hakama pants, typically worn by Samurai, and the famed Adibreak Originals were combined in the wrapped and snapped workwear pants. Transformable backpacks worn on the chest became soft armor. Protection and preparedness were undercurrents of the collection, yet there was no angst here. The lineup was a fairly rigorous study of line, proportion, shape.

Taking things back to the nature aspect of the “contranatural” theme was a meticulously constructed tracksuit. On a black ground, white piping traces organic shapes based on the topographic map of Mount Fuji. This garment is constructed of hand-sewn puzzle pieces; it’s a wonderful eruption of creative thinking and savoir-faire that takes sportswear to new heights and captured the feeling described in “Down in It” by Nine Inch Nails:

“Kinda like a cloud, I was up, way up in the sky 
And I was feeling some feelings you wouldn’t believe 
Sometimes I don’t believe them myself 
And I decided I was never coming down”