Ballad of a thin man. A man who wears worn cowboy boots, and a white leather jacket, with fringe. Western style. Ballad of a man who wears jeans, and a white cowboy hat. Ballad of a man whose very name conjures up America, counter-culture, freedom, and open reads. Ballad of a man who doesn’t dress, but is one with his clothes and hair, and craggy face. Total icon.

Bob Dylan captures America, and American style, the way Yohji Yamamoto has captured Japan and Japanese style. Both transport and export, so that we, whether Japanese or American, become Yohji, become Dylan. There are no words to describe something that is authentic. It just sits, sits just so.

Yamamoto is authentic because he works without trend forecasters and weathervanes, but with an inner compass. That is why his clothes are eternal, and a Yohji shirt from 1987 can be a shirt from 2004. Dylan is authentic because he sings about what he knows. He sings about working-class people, about pain, about his pain, about loneliness, about American things that Europeans, despite endless theorising, just can’t imitate, unless they ship over there, and commit to the still frontier.

I wonder if Bob Dylan knows how good his clothes look on him. He must have been aware of his image when, as a young man, he changed his name. He must know that wearing the icons of the American West stirs the urge for freedom nestled in all our hearts. He must know that the beard, the wispy hair, the painful disclaimers that he was going nowhere for a long time, makes him inscrutable abd approachable and eminently revered.

Yamamoto is a rock. He too is sibylline in his pronouncements. Once can’t think of words he has used. It’s in a seam, in the rip of a tailored jacket, in the upside-down fine-tuned turn of a sleeve, worn differently than one ever thought a sleeve could be worn. He speaks, like Dylan, through his work.

Wonder if these two titans have ever thought of each other? The one must have heard the music of the other… you can’t be late 20th century and have missed its sound after the 1960s. If Dylan has thought about Yohji is another question. Each must stay true to is constituency. To being self-described and self-defined.

The fabric of sound. The sound of fabric.

by Cornelia Lauf.