Meet Aoi Yamada, the Avant-Garde Dancer the Fashion World Can’t Get Enough Of

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True originals are exhausting to come back by, however Aoi Yamada actually qualifies. The Tokyo-based 21-year-old self-described “dancer, mannequin, and expresser” is immediately recognizable. Not simply due to her actions, but in addition owing to her avant garde efficiency appears to be like, which might be something from a leotard printed with Matsumoto Fortress to a coiffure that appears like a thatched Japanese roof. This sui generis impact makes her exhausting to neglect. Seemingly, that’s why she’s already labored with Stella McCartney, modeled for Fred Perry, and, most notably, carried out a solo dance on the closing ceremony of the 2020 Olympic Video games in Tokyo final summer time. For the latter, she wore a bedazzled headpiece and a jacket made from paper skinny strips of inexperienced and brown cloth; when she spun, she regarded like a brush in a carwash.

Yamada began dancing when she was round 5 years outdated, attempting out totally different genres earlier than realizing that she was actually simply in it for the enjoyable. “I loved carrying my favourite garments and dancing with my favourite music,” Yamada says. Her love of vogue additionally dates again to her childhood. In elementary college, she remembers shopping for new problems with Vogue and experimenting with picture shoots, utilizing her mom’s garments. “I gathered up her garments, coordinated them, and took an image of it in the course of the rice discipline in entrance of her home,” she says. “The colours and mixtures I noticed after I was little, I really feel that it’s unconsciously affecting the current.”

At 15, she attended a dance specialty highschool in Tokyo earlier than assembly her present supervisor two years later. Then, she began to mannequin and carry out in music movies, stage performances, and at Basel World in 2018 and 2019. Nonetheless, she considers the Olympic efficiency her massive break—and actually, who might ask for a extra world stage?

There’s a sure high quality in Yamada’s work that resists definition. She calls her follow “expression,” moderately than “dance,” a choice she made after seeing photographs of the mannequin Sayoko Yamaguchi and Butoh dancers. (Butoh, a Japanese type of dance first carried out in 1959, is carried out by dancers with shaved heads coated in white powder, with the give attention to gradual or erratic actions moderately than leaps and kicks.) In a latest Instagram reel, Yamada performs to the sound and flashing lights of a clicking digital camera. Wearing inexperienced pants and a turtleneck, topped with a pink gown and gloves, she mimes sweeping and posing for the digital camera, strolling forwards and backwards. The garments give the efficiency a dizzying, nearly hypnotic impact.