A big part of the experience of attending fashion shows is the music. Sometimes it's because the choice is so unexpected and brilliant (Marc Jacobs using the theme music to Jaws at his latest women's show, for example) or because a whole genre or era emerges as the soundtrack to an entire week of shows in a city (hip-hop at the recent men's shows in New York; post punk and early rave at the most recent LC:M). Fashion shows are fleeting, and despite the huge number of people involved – the sets, the lighting and a cast of beautiful models – it is the music that brings it all together.
Records of these rarified occasions do exist, though. In an attempt to open up one such archive, LN-CC (Late Night Chameleon Cafe), the online store with a showroom in Dalston, London, has curated a selection of music and books covering the career of the designer Yohji Yamamatoin conjunction with his current collections for men and women online.
Yamamoto is an artist with a 30-year career span. His name is still resonant from the decade when "designer fashion" really came into mainstream vocabulary, and has been kept buoyant by high-profile collaborations with the likes of Adidas. As his current collections demonstrate, he is a designer still pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable and has always put music at the centre of what he does, especially in his catwalk shows.
The curated items available include a series of volumes on CD called The Show, cataloguing the music composed for Yamamoto's Paris runway shows up to 2002, focusing on collaborations with Japanese contemporaries Ryuichi Sakamoto and other members of Yellow Magic Orchestra. The care with which such items have been catalogued, and the renown of the musicians involved, is testament to the scale of Yamamoto's vision over the last decades. The availability of this archive alongside his current collections on such a contemporary portal is also evidence of a longevity rare in fashion.
If this has piqued your interest in the documentation of fashion history, an exhibition that should be on your radar is the ICA's current Off-Site: A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now exhibition at the Old Selfridges hotel. In this fabulously dishevelled space, a vast room of individually curated vitrines demonstrates the complex links between the art world, music, nightlife and fashion, told through such ephemera as club flyers, fashion show invites, Polaroids and show accessories.