PENCILED IN: As any editor vying for a moment backstage with Yohji Yamamoto, the veteran Japanese designer prefers to let his work do the talking, offering parcimonious nuggets of his deep knowledge of fashion history, tailoring and textiles. 

But much of the process behind the striking silhouettes that he puts on the runway four times a year in Paris during the men’s and women’s fashion weeks remains unseen.

A new book written by French fashion historian Alexandre Samson, who is a curator at Paris’ Palais Galliera fashion museum, gives a glimpse into the creative process behind Yamamoto’s work through a never before published collection of 183 drawings created between 1981 and 1999.

For Samson, the 320-page volume is “the story of a discovery” that began in a Tokyo warehouse in May 2024.

“Inside [a pile of cardboard boxes] were many hundreds of sheets of paper, bundled together or filed in ring binders,” he said. “What had initially been mistaken for paperwork was in fact original artwork, drawn by the fashion house’s founder — sketches for each of his menswear and womenswear collections, which were some of the most influential of the late 20th century.”

But in Yamamoto-typical fashion, the designer modestly deemed them “just drawings,” Samson recalled.

Devotees of his fashions will likely disagree, seeing his pencil strokes bring to life elegant dresses and coats with flame-like lapels, or depict a crane and a contorting human with the same energetic strokes.

“A design sketch is not a miniature, nor is it a realistic illustration or a cartoon figure,” Yamamoto said in the 2010 book “My Dear Bomb.”

“It is not a question of how artistically accomplished the sketch is,” the designer continued. “Such sketches are best thought of as a kind of code shared by the designer and the patternmaker.”

Selected by Yamamoto and with design support from renowned British graphic designer Peter Saville, illustrations span both menswear and womenswear designs over a period stretching from the first Paris show in 1981 to 1999.

Published on Oct. 29 by Thames & Hudson, “Yohji Yamamoto Drawings” will retail for 85 euros in Europe, before becoming available in the U.S. on Nov. 17, priced at $115.