At this weekend’s Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography in France, designer Yohji Yamamoto announced that he’s directing his first ever feature film.
In an interview with WWD, Yamamoto said he's overseeing the general creative aspects of the film — whose name and theme are being kept under wraps — but he's not going to be in charge of it on a granular level. Yamamoto has hired someone to write the film's script, which isn't based on his life. He also said he sees designing fashion and designing costumes as two distinct professions. Whether that means he'll hire someone else to make the costumes was unclear.
"I don’t want to kill the characters of the actors and actresses with my ego," he said. "[Costume designers] have to know which fashions and which trends were running at which time, so their knowledge of past clothing is sometimes better than ours."
Yamamoto has designed costumes for films in the past. He made the clothes for Takeshi Kitano's film Dolls and also made some 500 costumes for Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World in the early '90s.