THE DEATH OF ARTHUR
How the poetic designer Yohji Yamamoto found inspiration in the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings from the 1893 edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for his Fall 2003 Collection. Beardsley’s black ink drawings (much like Yamamoto’s black draped garments) were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic… Both Beardsley and Yamamoto have a darkness in common, a shared aversion to mainstream homogenization and the human idea of perfection. The designer was quoted in an interview with Susannah Frankel for Another Magazine saying that he “preferred to start working on the sidewalk of fashion as opposed to the mainstream, on the dark side, the wild side of the street, from the narrow, wrong side of the street… I think perfection is ugly… Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see the scars, failure, disorder, distortion...” Similarly, Beardsley was quoted as saying “I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing." Yamamoto’s cleaver use of Beardsley’s bold black and white graphics as printed textiles, layered with the geometry of the multi-scale monochrome houndstooth checks made for a most striking collection…
Le Morte d'Arthur, Middle French for "The Death of Arthur", is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table, along with their respective folklore. In order to tell a ‘complete’ story of Arthur from his conception to his death, Malory compiled, rearranged, interpreted and modified material from various French and English sources. Written in prison, Le Morte d'Arthur was first published in 1485 at the end of the medieval English era by William Caxton.
“This edition of Sir Thomas Malory's “Morte d'Arthur'“ was published in 1893 by J. M. Dent. This edition was illustrated by the young Aubrey Beardsley. His style of illustration at the time, with its elegant lines executed in high-contrast black and white, perfectly fit Dent's production values. With this work Beardsley found a broad popular audience…” • The Metropolitan Museum of Art • All runway images courtesy of Livingly • All collages by Sarah Aaronson
