Doja Cat
Doja Cat performs onstage for the 2021 Billboard Music Awards. Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for dcp

Doja Cat is constantly reinventing her aesthetic while giving us something fresh every time she hits the stage and red carpet. Her next era, based on her forthcoming album titled Planet Her, is already giving us all the intergalactic Afro-futuristic vibes our inner nerd needs. First she performed “Say So” on the Grammys wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier alien-esque bodysuit. Then, in the music video for her current single, “Kiss Me More” featuring SZA, the two artists were seen as futuristic, outer-world deities. And finally, their debut performance of that track at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards saw Doja playing within that same space-themed concept with dancers dressed up like planetary systems. Doja, it seems, is truly bringing us to ‘Planet Her.’

Now she’s taken it one further jump into hyperspace, wearing an Issey Miyake pleated ensemble which seems to take inspiration from a Kansai Yamamoto original design for the late Ziggy Stardust himself: David Bowie. Posting to her Instagram account on Monday, April 25,  the look channels the same essence as the now iconic striped Tokyo Pop jumpsuit with flared legs David Bowie wore in 1973.

Alongside Japanese design heavyweights Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo is Kansai Yamamoto, a Japanese designer who was ahead of his time. Kansai Yamamoto was playing with conceptual, avant garde, gender-fluid silhouettes before it was widely acceptable. In 1971, he was among the first Japanese designers to show in London — a decade before his contemporaries Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. He sadly passed in 2020 from complications due to leukemia.

David Bowie in Kansai Yamamoto. Photo by Masayoshi Sukita
Kansai x David Bowie
Costume by designer Kansai Yamamoto and used by David Bowie. Photo courtesy MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images

Yamamoto was responsible for many of Bowie’s most iconic outfits during his Ziggy Stardust — Bowie’s stage alter ego — era, including all the costumes for his infamous 1973 Aladdin Sane tour. Going on to design costumes for the likes of Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and even Lady Gaga, Yamamoto carved out a lane for himself with his distinct aesthetic —  that is still influencing designers today. In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum staged an exhibition, ‘David Bowie Is,’ an exhibition of Bowie’s costumes with Yamamoto’s designs on display front and center. The show was a hit and then traveled around the world landing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2018.

David Bowie
Kansai Yamamoto. Photo by Dave M. Benett/Getty Images for Victoria & Albert Museum

We’re more than certain Yamamoto would have loved Doja’s homage to him as he was a fan of young creative energy.