Hana Yagi on Fashion, History and the Permission to Create

Hana Yagi Portrait

Before Hana Yagi begins talking about fashion, she talks about the irreversible process of actually making fashion. Once a sheet of metal is cut, it can never be whole again. The same is true of a piece of cloth. It’s an unexpected place for a designer to begin. Conversations about fashion usually revolve around aesthetics, trends, or silhouettes. Yagi starts somewhere else entirely, talking about decisions that can’t be undone.

That understanding came long before she ever touched a wedding dress. Her father was a sheet metal craftsman, and his workshop became her first classroom. Metal surrounded her childhood, but so did freedom; while he spent his days shaping rigid material into useful forms, he never insisted that his daughter follow his methods. Instead, he gave her something far more valuable than instruction: space.

“I was allowed to do anything I wanted,” she tells New Wave. “My father, in a good way, didn’t interfere with me.”

She remembers experimenting with dye, heat, and fabric in the workshop, turning it into a place of curiosity rather than instruction. Looking back, she believes that environment defined her far more than any technical lesson ever could. People often assume artists inherit talent. Listening to Yagi, it feels more accurate to say she inherited permission. Permission to experiment, to fail, and to spend time with a material before deciding what it wanted to become. That patience still defines the way she works today.

Her work often begins with garments that have already completed their original purpose: wedding dresses returned after ceremonies, or kimonos whose owners have disappeared into time, carrying histories that remain largely inaccessible. Unlike designers working with bolts of newly woven fabric, Yagi begins with something finite. “There may never be another piece of the same material,” she explains. Sometimes there isn’t enough fabric to create the silhouette she first imagined. Every cut has consequences and every decision closes off another possibility for good.

That makes planning her garments less about efficiency and more about responsibility. “Things don’t always go as planned when you actually start working with your hands.” She smiles almost imperceptibly as she says it, not with frustration, but with affection. “When that happens, you think about how to recover from it.” Then comes the sentence that quietly unlocks her entire practice: Interacting with materials, including the times when things don’t go as planned, is usually a  thrilling one.

Hana Yagi Look "Sanguine Bride"

While many designers talk about control, Yagi talks about conversion. The material she initially uses resists what she wants to achieve, and she responds to it. Its unexpected behavior surprises her, prompting her to change course and explore a different material or pattern. In her hands, making something isn’t about forcing a vision onto fabric, it’s about working with a material that already carries its own history. That may be why her garments don’t feel reconstructed. They feel as though they have been gently convinced to become something new.

As our conversation continues, it becomes clear that Yagi is less interested in making clothes than in using them to ask questions. The wedding dresses she takes apart have already lived other lives. Most were rented, worn by women she will never know. “I don’t have precise information about the wearers,” she says. “Everything is purely speculative.”

Many artists would see that absence as an invitation to invent. Yagi sees it as a warning. There is no moment when the stories of those brides themselves become mine. The distinction is subtle but profound. She refuses the temptation to claim another person’s history as artistic material, instead drawing a strict boundary between their lives and her imagination. “What belongs to me,” she says, “are the imaginations and questions that arise within me in the face of an unknown past.”

That sentence reframes everything. She is not trying to recover lost histories; she is trying to understand why their absence affects her so deeply. One question, in particular, returns repeatedly. She speaks about her mother with unmistakable tenderness; “I love my mother very much and respect her deeply”, before letting another thought emerge after a quiet pause: “I sometimes wonder what kind of life she would have led if she hadn’t married my father”.

It is not regret or criticism, but an acknowledgement that every decision creates another life that will never be lived. Another possibility is lost when you make a choice. For Yagi, that realisation is embedded within every wedding dress she touches, turning the garment into evidence of all the futures that disappeared the moment one future was chosen.

There is remarkable restraint in the way she approaches imagination. While contemporary art often celebrates an artist’s ability to transform fragments into narratives, Yagi remains highly suspicious of that impulse. “I believe there is a certain violence,” she says, “in filling in the gaps of past stories of people we don’t know well with our imagination and turning them into works of art.” It is perhaps the most striking statement she makes. Artists are usually encouraged to claim stories; Yagi questions whether they should. Admitting she never reaches complete understanding, that no amount of imagination can bridge the distance between her and the women who wore these dresses, she chooses instead to allow uncertainty to remain. She does not wait for an answer before creating, she creates because the question refuses to leave.

That is the clearest way to understand Hana Yagi, she is not restoring garments but is preserving uncertainty. In a culture obsessed with immediate interpretation and definitive meaning, her practice insists that some questions deserve to remain unanswered, and some histories deserve the humility of admitting they cannot be fully known. There is a temptation in contemporary fashion to mistake visible repair for a new concept, where patchwork becomes an aesthetic, frayed edges become a mood board, and visible stitches serve as shorthand for authenticity. Hana Yagi resists that temptation entirely.

When asked about Boro, the centuries-old Japanese practice of repeatedly repairing and layering cloth, she immediately redirects the conversation away from surface appearance. Boro was never intended to be beautiful; it was intended to keep people alive. “I think that’s a positive thing,” she says when asked whether traditions survive through reinterpretation. “However, the underlying reality is lost.” The sentence lands with excellent precision as every generation inherits culture differently, but something disappears each time a tradition leaves the harsh conditions that created it. Boro emerged in the cold rural regions of northern Japan because replacing worn clothing was impossible. Cloth became an inheritance; sleeves were patched, patched again, and passed down through generations who left themselves inside the fabric. No one was trying to create art.

Boro Look

Today, museums display Boro textiles behind glass, and luxury fashion houses borrow their textures as evidence of craft. Yagi knows she participates in that transformation, “My work ultimately becomes a piece of art”, yet she insists on a crucial distinction. Many designers borrow from history as though the past exists merely to provide a visual language. “For me, history is about being honest with what I inherit. I can honor a tradition without romanticizing the hardship behind it, and I can preserve its memory without pretending that the suffering itself is something to celebrate.”

She offers no definitive answers, explaining instead why rags became central to her own practice. “I like dresses. I like haute couture”. Then comes the sentence that shifts the conversation away from fashion altogether: “I don’t find any sense of reality in a culture that involves wearing dresses.” It is not a rejection of craftsmanship or a dismissal of couture, but an admission that the traditions dominating global fashion were never her own. Much of what the world recognises as modern fashion is rooted in European history, emerging from Parisian haute couture and the rituals of an alien aristocracy. While Japanese designers have long transformed those traditions into something entirely their own, Yagi believes the distance never fully disappears. “In present-day Japan,” she says, “fashion is based on concepts and clothing imported from the West.”

That gap is where she found rags. Not because they were beautiful, but because they belonged. “I felt that rags stand on a completely different set of values than Western haute couture”...“They possess the strength to stand in opposition to it.” Rather than attempting to erase the traditions of couture, Yagi questions why they became the standard against which every other tradition is measured. The worn fragments of cloth running through her work are acts of resistance, resistance against the idea that luxury alone deserves preservation, against the assumption that elegance only belongs to wealth, and against histories that celebrate finished garments while overlooking the people who spent generations simply trying to keep warm.

“I feel a distinctly Japanese rebellious spirit in rags and tattered clothes.” The phrase is striking because rebellion is rarely associated with repair. Yet repair refuses waste, replacement, and the belief that value disappears the moment something becomes damaged. While Japan preserves extraordinary institutional textile traditions like Nishijin weaving, Yagi chose a different path.

“They will be preserved,” she says of traditional crafts. “But the clothing I personally wanted to commit to and leave behind in history was rags.” Most artists hope to elevate overlooked materials; Yagi hopes to elevate overlooked lives. Luxury survives because institutions preserve it; ordinary clothing survives only because someone decided it deserved to. In her hands, a torn sleeve is no longer evidence of decay, but proof that someone, somewhere, believed a life was still worth saving.

Fashion has always struggled with a question that literature and cinema confronted long ago: How much complexity will people tolerate? Designers spend months constructing ideas that will be consumed in seconds on an endless, frictionless scroll. Hana Yagi lives directly inside this tension. When asked whether she still feels the limitations of fashion as a medium, she doesn’t hesitate. “I still have internal conflicts”. In an industry where success encourages certainty and recognition rewards confidence, her honesty is startling. Comparing fashion to literature, where a novel that underestimates its audience’s intelligence receives a negative reaction, unlike fashion, which is often consumed purely for speed, pleasure, or aesthetic pause, she accepts the contradiction. “Sometimes I’m fed up with that fact,” she admits. “Other times I feel relieved by it.”

Rather than resolving these tensions, she chooses to inhabit them: repair and destruction, beauty and violence, memory and speculation, tradition and rebellion. She enjoys making things with her hands, driven by an obsession she knows will never stop. What remains uncertain is whether fashion will always be the language through which that creation speaks. Those questions took on an entirely different scale when she was invited to create the Wimbledon look for tennis champion Naomi Osaka. Until then, Yagi’s work had largely unfolded within galleries and the slower rhythms of contemporary art. Suddenly, her practice would appear on one of the most watched sporting stages in the world, with a strict condition: everything had to be white.

Naomi Osaka Photograph by Adam Kudeimati

For an artist who previously dismantled the oppressive symbolism of white wedding dresses in her Sanguine Bride series, the constraint appeared paradoxical. But Yagi refused to force a political critique where it didn't belong. “The white in Sanguine Bride is in a different context from the white at Wimbledon,” she notes. At Wimbledon, the tournament and the athlete came first. Recalling a conversation with creative director Marty Harper about the metaphor of Naomi "marrying the god of victory on the court," Yagi smiled at the idea. “If Naomi is going to marry the god of victory, I want to support her as much as I can.”

“I’d hope that when people return to my earlier work, they discover more than the high-profile commissions. There are ideas and questions in those pieces that matter to me just as much.” Her practice asks whether the stories and values associated with clothing can be deconstructed in the same way as the material itself. She deconstructs belief with the same care she pulls apart seams, transforming every removed stitch into a new question.

Near the end of our conversation, I move beyond garments and ask what the next generation of creative women in Japan needs most, not simply to succeed, but to create freely, take risks, and claim space on their own terms. Her answer comes quietly: “Permission…” she says, before recalling something her mother told her years ago. At a time when the emotional weight and uncertainty of making art felt overwhelming, she complained to her mother about how difficult it had become. Her mother listened and then gave her an answer that stayed with her: “If it’s so hard, then just quit.”

What sounds, at first, like permission to walk away became something else entirely: permission to choose. To understand that continuing to make art had to be an active decision, not an obligation, and that if she chose to stay, it would be because the work mattered enough to her to keep going.

Naomi Osaka Photograph by Sebastian Arriagada

The sentence landed like a shock, not because it was cruel, but because it was true. Yagi realised she had been waiting for someone else to validate her labour, wanting someone to want her to create. “I believe that creating something means setting a problem of your own volition and then solving it yourself.”

The artist does not wait for permission, funding, or an audience to begin. They decide what deserves to be questioned. Yagi’s advice to younger creatives cuts straight to the core: They need permission to set their own problems, and start creating them, even before someone chooses them.

Reflecting on our conversation, from the sheet metal workshop to discarded wedding dresses, patched Boro cloth, and a pure white Wimbledon dress, a unified philosophy emerges. Creation begins with humility: humility before materials, before history, before lives we cannot fully understand, and before the possibility that art does not exist to provide tidy answers. Perhaps that is why Yagi’s work lingers long after the garments leave the room. Not because they demand our admiration, but because they ask us to hesitate, to recognise that every object carries hidden histories, that every choice creates another life left unlived, and that repair is the ultimate evidence that something was loved enough to save.

Her mother had given her permission to walk away. What Yagi eventually understood was that the same permission could also mean choosing to stay.

“I think, in the end, I had to give myself something no one else could,” she says. “Permission to continue creating, even if no one asked me to.”