Knifekick

Meet the Genius Behind David Bowie’s Best Costumes

n January 1972, David Bowie and his band set out on the Ziggy Stardust Tour, an 18-month, three-continent sojourn to support the albums The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane. As epoch-defining as the songs on those records were, it could be argued that Bowie’s persona, Ziggy Stardust, had a greater impact on sex, fashion, and the gender-bending pageantry of 70s glam rock that would eventually follow. Many of Ziggy’s most eye-popping outfits—avant-garde kimonos and billowing structural pantsuits—were made by Kansai Yamamoto, a Tokyo-based designer who had no idea that his creations would become such important visual markers in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

Japanese photographer and editor Kazumi Asamura Hayashi caught up with Kansai—who in the decades since Ziggy has continued to push fashion in new directions—to talk about the first time he crossed paths with Bowie and how his interest in Central Asian fabrics led to a coat that can cause car accidents.

VICE: I heard a rumor that David Bowie wanted you to design these costumes so badly that he flew out in his jet to ask you in person. What was it like meeting him for the first time?

Kansai Yamamoto: I actually had no idea who David Bowie was until I saw him wearing my clothes onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Yasuko Hayashi, my stylist, was doing work for David Bowie and gave him some of my clothes. This was the first time I had ever met an artist who was wearing my designs. Before then, I didn’t know how immensely talented he was. (A similar thing happened to me with Lady Gaga. I only found out how talented she was when I looked her up on the internet ten minutes before I met her.) At the time, David Bowie was all about transcending gender. I didn’t know anything about concepts like that, so I remember thinking whoa when I saw him wearing clothes I had designed for women. The clothes were influenced by hikinuki, the method of changing costumes quickly in kabuki. The audience in New York saw the costumes transform a few times during the show. I realized I had done something really cool when everyone in the audience got on their feet and clapped.

I met a lot of famous people in the Western music world through David, and the one thing I can say for sure is that the best people in the world have distinctive personalities that are completely out of the ordinary.

You’ve said your work has a “Japanese beauty.” What do you mean by that? Why was Andy Warhol obsessed with canned food? It’s the same with me, but I’m going after Japanese themes. Every artist has his own thing going on. I often use Japanese motifs and sometimes wonder if I’m choosing them because I’m Japanese. Having been all over the world and to countries with various religious backgrounds as much as I have, I sometimes wonder where I’m really from. I’m Japanese, so of course I think of myself as Japanese, and I eat Japanese food most of the time. I hardly ever eat Western food. That said, my daughter Mirai’s homemade spaghetti is really tasty! But of course I eat it with chopsticks. It would be rude to try and act cool and eat it with a fork.

Hi Austin. Fuck SXSW. There… I said it.

Here, the music comes last. 5 minute set-up, no sound check, 15 minute set.  The “music” element is all a front, it’s the first thing to be compromised. Corporate money everywhere but in the hands of the artists, at what is really just a glorified corporate networking party. Drunk corporate goons and other industry vampires and cocaine. Everyone is drunk, being cool. “Official” bureaucracy and all their mindless rules.  Branding, branding, branding. It’s bullshit… sorry. 

THE MYSTERIOUS AND DEPRESSING CASE OF PRISONER X

The grave of Ben Zygier, Israel’s “Prisoner X”

On Tuesday morning, the Australian news network ABC broadcast a story revealing the identity of the mysterious “Prisoner X,” who died in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison in 2010. In fact, “Prisoner X” was the subject of a case so secret that ABC claimed even the guards inside the Ayalon prison didn’t know his identity, and that he “lived hermetically sealed from the outside world.” His arrest and detention have been described as a “disappearance,” setting alarm bells ringing for bodies such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, who argued that the idea of individuals simply vanishing from society is not a characteristic of a democratic state.

If the case already sounded like a bizarre 21st century combination of a Cold War spy thriller and The Man in the Iron Mask, things only got murkier when it was revealed that Prisoner X was found hanged in a cell that was under 24-hour surveillance, yet his incarceration was not officially recognized by either the Israeli Prison Service or the government. The Sydney Morning Herald also revealed on Wednesday that he was being watched by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), and that he had traveled to Iran, Syria, and Lebanon—all places that bar entry to people who’ve visited “the Zionist entity.” Israel forbids its citizens from traveling to these places for “security reasons,” so it was reported that Zygier, along with at least two others, had used their Australian passports. It’s been suggested often before that Australians are favored for spy missions because they don’t attract suspicion.

One thing ABC was clear about from the start was his identity—he was an Australian national named Ben Zygier, who had moved to Israel ten years before his death and changed his name to Ben Alon, before marrying an Israeli woman with whom he had two children. It seems likely that Zygier spent time working as a spy for the infamous Israeli secret service agency the Mossad before being jailed without an open trial and dying in his cell. ABC stated that his body was flown to Melbourne in December 2010 for burial, but the Australian government wasn’t informed of his death. This constitutes a violation of fairly basic international law, something that Israel is admittedly no stranger to.

Ayalon prison, where Zygier was detained

This is where it all started to become a problem for the Israeli government. Israeli media outlets usually manage to bypass the military censor for high profile stories by quoting foreign media sources and, initially, the local Israeli press jumped on ABC’s revelation. However, it seems that the Prisoner X case is shrouded in even more secrecy than the strikes Israel recently carried out in Syria and the country’s incursion into Lebanese airspace. Ha’aretz later reported that:

“The Prime Minister’s Office called on Tuesday an emergency meeting of the Israeli Editors Committee, an informal forum comprised of the editors and owners of major Israeli media outlets, to ask its members to cooperate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency.”

Official Statement from the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz: