There are few colours in fashion as loaded as Yohji Yamamoto’s black. In his world, black is not absence. It is memory, resistance, dignity, shadow, protection, and a refusal to explain too much.
Now, that language has moved from clothing into furniture. Through WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO, the designer’s universe enters into dialogue with Mitsukoshi Seisakusho, reimagining the historic Bamboo Chair originally designed in 1937 by Umonji Kidokoro while he was working at the Mitsukoshi Furniture Design Office, the predecessor of today’s Mitsukoshi Seisakusho.
The original chair already carried a strange modernity. Built from bamboo, it fused a traditional Japanese material with modern design thinking, creating a piece that felt both rooted and forward-looking. In the new collaboration, that history is not erased. It is darkened, sharpened, and pulled into Yamamoto’s orbit.
The result is a jet-black Bamboo Chair that feels less like a decorative object than a quiet confrontation. The chair keeps the elegance and construction logic of the original, but the black surface changes its emotional temperature completely. Bamboo, usually associated with lightness, warmth, and organic softness, becomes severe, sculptural, almost ceremonial.
That is what makes the collaboration compelling. Yamamoto does not simply apply black as a colourway. He turns black into an atmosphere. The chair begins to behave like one of his garments: restrained, poetic, slightly mournful, and deeply aware of the body that might inhabit it.
The project also speaks to a wider movement in contemporary fashion, where brands are no longer content to remain inside clothing alone. They enter interiors, objects, furniture, books, cafés, architecture, and domestic ritual. But in this case, the gesture feels unusually natural. Yamamoto’s work has always been about space: space around the body, space inside fabric, space between presence and disappearance.
Presented through WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO, the chair was created as part of a collaboration collection with Mitsukoshi Seisakusho, with special exhibition and order activity beginning through official channels and WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO Osaka.
Photos: Yohji Yamamoto