Wim Wenders owned a jacket designed by Yohji Yamamoto that "reminded me of my childhood and my father, as if the essence of this memory were tailored into it." That Proustian premise led the film director to accept a commission by the Centre Pompidou to make a film on the designer. The result is a meeting of two minds for whom neither craft has any known boundaries. So a discussion of fabrics and forms leads Wenders back to his favorite subject, the texture of the city; and the film becomes, in critic Janet Maslin's words, "about fashion, transience, and identity." But couture as a thought process has its limitations. The designer, looking at a photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre, is intrigued by the cut of his lapels. Fashion and Nothingness?(JB)