At over 80 years old, Yohji Yamamoto remains the critical conscience of fashion. Around Paris Fashion Week SS26, the Japanese designer stated bluntly that “the fashion industry is disappearing” and that “fashion has become a joke it’s only about money,” accusing the big groups of “chasing the ball” without thinking about the customer anymore. The statements were published and amplified by Business of Fashion and widely picked up on social media.
The message hits at a sensitive moment: a spectacular Paris season, with changes of direction at the major houses and 111 shows on the calendar, but also with visible signs of fatigue in the luxury business. Behind the sparkle, growth is slowing, and the pressure on creativity and prices feeds the cynicism that Yamamoto denounces.
Why does Yamamoto say the business is “disappearing”? In his interpretation, the very fabric that made fashion viable is thinning: craftsmanship, people, and aesthetic meaning. He warns that specialists in fabrics, dyers, and fine ateliers are disappearing that is, the infrastructure without which authentic luxury does not exist. At the same time, shows are getting bigger, while clothes are becoming less and less essential.
The paradox is that, while he criticizes the system, Yamamoto remains a benchmark of coherence: his collection shown in Paris (SS26) “cuts” down to the essential black, cuts that breathe, poetic gravity as a counterbalance to the season’s excess. It is an aesthetic of resistance: less “spectacle,” more truth of form.
Conclusion: when Yamamoto says that “fashion business is disappearing,” he is not proclaiming the end of fashion, but of a form of fashion commerce that has forgotten craftsmanship and the customer. It is a warning and, at the same time, an invitation: to rebuild value around people (artisans, designers, wearers), not just around numbers. And if Paris remains the stage of the dream, the reality that gives it meaning is tailored in the ateliers, where fashion is not a “joke,” but work, time, and memory.
In the end, the most radical act isn’t shouting louder. It’s cutting closer.
