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Walter Benjamin’s argument on the separation of the aura from artwork, due to technological reproducibility, continues to resonate in contemporary visual culture where the ‘image-copy’ has become an accepted means of representation, over the ‘object-real’. In this respect, the aura, which corresponded to material quality of the artwork as an ‘object-thing’, has become less accessible due to the accelerated growth of reproduction through new modalities in the postmodern era. This affected Wim Wenders during the filming of Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a documentary on the conceptual fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto that reveals his craft-oriented, inimitable deconstructive design process, in particular signifying the meaning of identity and the reconsideration of the concept of aura. Reading the film in light of Yamamoto’s open process and his iconoclastic personification – as opposed to the myth of the designer that is prioritized in the hermetic world of fashion – along with Wenders’s challenge to authorship allows us to map out the possible relationships between the aura and identity. Correspondingly, Yamamoto’s auratic resistance to obsessions with image and novelty in the spatio-temporal frame of contemporary fashion are revealed through the film. Enabling a cross-disciplinary reading, the film illustrates interactions between the disciplines of filmmaking and fashion design, i.e. the connections between image production, cutting and processes of assembly. Finally, contrasting the multiplicity of images and products in the age of reproduction, the film specifically focuses on the notion of tactility and materiality in both creative fields.
