Kansai Yamamoto

was a Japanese fashion designer, most influential during the 1970s and 1980s. Early life and career Kansai was born in 1944 in Yokohama, Japan. He focused on civil engineering in high school, and majored in English at the Nippon University until he dropped out in 1965 to focus on fashion. He apprenticed at ateliers of designers Junko Koshino and Hisashi Hosono while studying fashion on his own. He was awarded the Soen prize by the Bunka Fashion College in 1967. Yamamoto's work displayed an aesthetic of "wild maximalism". It has been described as "transgressive excess" and the "opposite" of the concept of wabi-sabi.