An interesting twist on exhibition thematics, Contemporary Japanese Fashion: The Mary Baskett Collection shows at The Textile Museum, in Washington, D.C., through April 11, 2010. Drawn from the collection of Mary Baskett, who was formerly curator of prints at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in Ohio, the garments represent largely the works of Japanese fashion designers, an avant-garde group primarily made up of Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto. Guest curated by Cynthia Amnéus, curator of fashion arts and textiles at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Textile Museum takes care to point out that the exhibition’s clothing is very much intertwined with Baskett’s professional and personal life, in fact, representing her daily attire.

Baskett was sent by her museum to Japan beginning in the the late 1960s to purchase works of contemporary Japanese printmakers and there she found an exciting and experimental world of fashion. Entranced with the Japanese designs, she became an avid collector of their and others’ works, with over one hundred ensembles, and maintains a continuing wardrobe collection to the present-day. Baskett values both the construction and fine textiles of which these clothes are made but, as importantly, the distinctive, innovative ideations that Kawakubo, Miyake and Yamamoto bring to their craft.

With these three designers’ (now in their sixties and seventies) introduction to the West in the early 1980s, some of the usually recognized and hallowed design standards were thrown to the winds, influencing American and European collections. Their unique approaches included the utilization of asymmetry, raw edges, unconventional construction, oversized proportions, and monochromatic palettes.

Turning the focus away from her personal name as a designer, Rei Kawakubo rechanneled it instead to her designs by choosing the name Comme de Garçons, in 1973, to represent her label and company. Kawakubo’s clothing purposely deconstructs the traditional meaning of beauty and has been considered among other attributes unwearable, mystifying, silly. On the other hand, Kawakubo is revered for precisely these same qualities because of their challenging nature. “What is beautiful doesn’t have to be pretty,” she puts forth as an important dictum to her fashion philosophy. She began designing clothing during a time when she was a stylist for a Japanese advertising agency. With no knowledge of sewing, she plunged into the unknown and innovative: sometimes there is only one sleeve, sometimes the clothing looks torn, sometimes the inner construction is shown on the outside, sometimes the edges are unfinished and unraveled.

Issey Miyake is famous for his experimentation with pleating which led to his development of a technique whereby garments are cut and sewn, sandwiched between layers of paper, put into a heat press and pleated, holding them through the life of the garment. Among his costumes for the theater and dance are pleated ones for The Loss of Small Detail, a Frankfurt Ballet production.

In one instance of a series of artistic collaborations, Miyake collaborated with artist Yasumasa Morimura, for the polyester Morimura’s Doll Dress, a delightful post-modernist take on the nude, in this case from the painting La Source by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). At the dress bottom is Morimura himself, inverted with hands clasped in prayer. Miyake provided the garment shape and Morimura contributed the computer-processed photographs.

Yohji Yamamoto’s wool jacket and trousers is a powerful example of his use of asymmetry to destabilize our notion of just what constitutes the form that the classical suit takes, as he merges Western definitions of dress with contemporary Japanese visions of the possibilities of the unconventional. He is also known for the perfection of his construction techniques in draping and cutting. Yamamoto has said: “I often tell my patternmakers, ‘just listen to the material. What is it going to say? Just wait. Probably the material will teach you something.’ ” Yamamoto’s background includes a law degree from Keio University and working with his mother, a seamstress, until he started his own label, with his first collection debuting in Tokyo in 1977.

Mary Baskett continues to contribute to the scholarship of Japanese art with lectures and publications, and since 1977 has maintained the Mary Baskett Gallery, in Cincinnati, Ohio, which showcases contemporary Japanese artists.