In 1970 Kenzo Takada was the first Japanese fashion designer to show his work in Paris. He was joined very quickly on the catwalks of fashion’s capital by his compatriots, Issey Miyake and Kansai Yamamoto. They were three very different designers, and they were all well received. Initially, however, Kenzo, with his bright and cheerful, intensely youthful clothes, was the great success. The world of haute couture had only recently adjusted to the youthquake that was changing the world and shifting its spending power. The chasm that had existed between the couturiers and the manufacturers of ready-to-wear for the masses was narrowing. As London, Milan and New York began to challenge the pre-eminence of Paris as arbiter and producer of fashion, the couture houses, led by Cardin and Saint Laurent, were creating boutique lines, less expensive versions of their couture, and young designers such as Sonia Rykiel, Emmanuelle Khanh and Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé launched high-fashion lines that were firmly targeted at the ready-to-wear market.
In 1973 the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne united with Didier Grumbach’s Createurs et Industriels to form the Federation Française de la Couture, du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers and des Createurs de Mode. This umbrella organisation established the Chambre Syndicale du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers et des Createurs de Mode as a separate and parallel organisation to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Significantly, Kenzo was a member from the start, regarded then and always as a star of French fashion.
When Kenzo had launched his label three years earlier, the hedonistic 1960s were segueing into the more idealistic 1970s, when altruism and a global perspective would dominate youth culture. In the aftermath of 1968 and the Paris riots (which Kenzo witnessed) it was a time of making love, not war, of turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Some experimented with collective living, others took to the hippy trail to discover new, simpler cultures and hoped to find enlightenment there or at least some kind of spiritual experience. Kenzo’s innate eclecticism, his sensuous appreciation of print and pattern, his historicism and understanding of the drama of mass and volume, lush layers piled on in sizzling contrast—all expressed the joy in colour and natural beauty of the zeitgeist and captured the attention of the world’s press from his first showing.
It is arguable that history has already done Kenzo Takada an injustice. In the early 1970s his were the shows that attracted the hysterical crowds, his the name that defined youthful fashion. His innovations were hugely influential: he literally put the flowers into flower power and was part of a group which thoroughly democratised and rejuvenated high fashion. But he was eclipsed by the Japanese designers who came later and who did not integrate into the French system in the same way. Unlike Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto, Kenzo always appointed French managers while recruiting Japanese creatives. But he was probably the hottest designer of the early 1970s.
The fifth of seven children, Kenzo Takada was born in the village of Himeji, in the shadow of a great castle. His elderly father ran a teahouse, and Kenzo grew up surrounded by the geishas who worked there. He has described his father as ‘upright, taciturn, rigid’. His mother, he said, ‘was active, attentive, courageous.’ He did not enjoy the games the boys at school played and was usually to be found studying his sister’s fashion magazines and using the free patterns in them to make clothes. He made dolls too, and dressed them. ‘This,’ he told Ginette Sainderichin, ‘is how I edged my way into fashion and how, in my dreams, I sewed dresses for the round-eyed daughters of the far-off West.’
He dropped out of Kobe University in 1958 to join the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, which had just started accepting male applicants. He worked his way through college, winning prizes, including the coveted So-En award, and press attention. The lecturer who taught him draping, an alien technique to Japan where clothes were conceived on the flat, was Chie Koike, a graduate of L’Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She became Kenzo’s mentor and encouraged him to think of further study in Paris. His first job on graduation was with Mikura, a designer of ready-to-wear; he later moved to Sanai, which specialised in fast fashion for the young. That was an important experience as he learned to produce forty models a month while keeping his vision fresh. In 1964 he used a windfall 350,000 yen to travel, with a classmate and friend, Hiromisu Matsuda, by sea to Europe. It was the proverbial slow boat. They visited Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti and Alexandria on the way to Marseilles. They diverted to see Milan, Venice, Rome, Florence, Munich, Madrid and London before settling in Paris in spring 1965. (This was only the beginning of a lifetime’s travel, a lifetime’s passion for new places and cultures.)
When Kenzo first arrived in Paris he spoke no French. Having no work and little money, except what his mother could afford to send him, he wandered the streets, observing, learning, studying shop windows and watching the people. Eventually he was offered a job at Pisanti and then moved on to Relations Textiles, where he specialised in knitting techniques. Of all the Japanese designers working in the West, Kenzo was the most assimilated, a process which began as soon as he began to try to find work. ‘For the first four or five years in Paris,’ he wrote in 1985:
I watched and observed what Parisian chic and elegance mean. Whether it is haute couture or prêt-à-porter, French clothes are well fitted to the body. Well cut, fitted and finished impeccably, and they have curves. That is Parisian chic and elegance. Such clothes-making has its own rules for its shapes, fabric selections, colour combinations, and it seemed to me there are rules even for the way you wear these clothes. Those are all confined within a stubborn frame of mind. That was suffocating for me.
In 1970, with two fellow graduates of the Bunka, Atsuko Kondo and Atsuko Ansai, he launched the first Jungle Jap boutique in Galerie Vivienne near the Palais Royal. Its interior was inspired by the darkly threatening, exotically tropical dreamscape paintings of Le Douanier Rousseau and hinted mischievously at the nature of the clothes. He could not afford to buy the fabrics he wanted, so he bought some at flea markets and went back to Japan for some, buying printed cottons and silks, cutting them in fresh, simple, youthful styles and mixing new and old. This was the genesis of the Kenzo style which was to revitalise Paris fashion. In a first collection that was all about getting the attention of the press, he mixed plaids and florals, stripes and checks in a way that was reminiscent of how the geishas of his childhood layered their many brightly coloured, richly printed and embroidered kimonos, unafraid of colour clashes or the juxtaposition of patterns that refused to speak to each other.
Trained by his time at Sanai to the concept of fast-paced constantly renewed fashion, Kenzo produced five collections in his first year. He was an instant sensation, the darling of a fashion press that found what he had to offer exactly right for the times. From the kimono he also derived his cuts—all straight lines and simple squares. Reflecting on the birth of his signature style, he wrote in Liberté: Kenzo in 1987, ‘No more darts, I like bold, straight lines. Use cotton for summer and no lining for winter. Combine bright colours together, combine flowers, stripes and checks freely. This was the beginning of my style.’
The American press called his style ‘kicky’, probably because the models used to love the clothes so much they would bounce and twirl, grinning broadly, down the catwalk. To Kenzo can be attributed many of the key looks of the 1970s: tunics; Mao collars; layered looks; shawls and long, lushly patterned jacquard-woven scarves; Peruvian knits in vibrant colours; bobbles; big, big, square-cut jumpers; loose waistcoats; kimono-cut sleeves; baggy trousers; ingénue taffeta frocks bedecked with frills and flounces and folkloric and peasant looks inspired by traditional dress from all over the world. Mid-decade he was credited with introducing the unconstructed Big Look based on one-size-fits-all voluminous garments, a long, circular skirt worn with braces, topped with big shirts, big coats and capes that cut a dash as the wearer moved. ‘Much too big is the right size,’ Kenzo told Vogue in 1975, loosening his look even further with tent dresses, smocks and enormous striped dungarees with ‘elephant’ legs worn with thick-soled sandals.
The Big Look bombed in the United States but swept the rest of the fashionable world. However by the next year Kenzo was in a Tyrolean mood, cutting jackets closer to the body, starting a run on loden, boiled wool, braided trim and appliqué and introducing the hip-slung belt which, once again, the whole fashion world emulated. By 1978 he was playing with military looks based on Morocco’s Zouave soldiers with their voluminous striped jodhpurs and romantically full-sleeved shirts crisscrossed by bandoliers. By this point international fashion had gone seriously fancy-dress and sentimentally retrospective. For winter that year Kenzo showed white Nehru suits and swaggering, ruffled pirate shirts over narrow breeches.
The 1980s brought recession and the dress-for-success phenomenon born of a competitive workplace and women’s determination to shatter the glass ceiling that barred their route to the top of the professions and the business world. One strand of fashion became deadly serious and found many ways to ape the male business suit in an attempt to imply authority. This was the moment when minimalist designers like Calvin Klein, Armani and Zoran became dominant while iconoclastic designers in London, and then Antwerp and Japan began to challenge ideas of acceptable dressing and the fashion system itself. Another strand of establishment fashion became flirtatious, following the lead of Norma Kamali’s ra-ra look and making skirts shorter and flouncier and accessories cuter, girlier, almost infantilised. Kenzo found his place in the latter camp, doing easy, sporty collections that were still youthful, still pretty, still naive—possibly too naive for the decade—and consequently his importance began to wane.
In 1982 Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto showed in Paris for the first time. They, with Issey Miyake, became the definitive Japanese designers. ‘Comme and Yohji were a big shock to the system,’ Kenzo told Alicia Drake in 2006, ‘but in a way I am closer to them. At least I understood their construction of the garment. But what really threw me were Mugler and Montana and then Azzedine. They were doing clothes that were beautiful, sublime, but they were clothes that I really cannot do, clothes that were so highly structured. For me someone like Montana was the polar opposite of what I was doing. Fashion had changed completely.’
Yuniya Kawamura, writing in 2004, summed up Kenzo’s contribution succinctly, ‘Kenzo was the first to bring to the West what was not considered to be fashionable in Japan, and he was able to turn it into fashion. He may not have been as radical or avant-garde as other designers who followed him, but he showed that making something unfashionable into fashionable depends on the context in which the clothes are placed and the process that the clothes have gone through.’
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Kenzo’s importance declined as he attempted to keep pace with fashion’s moods while remaining true to his own vision. He retired in 1999, selling his company to LVMH and heading off to polish his painting and golfing skills. He said his goodbyes with characteristic exuberance, renting a Parisian theatre for the party, filling it with balloons and belly dancers and riding off into the sunset on the back of an elephant. The line is currently designed by Antonio Marras, an Italian.
Further reading: Ginette Sainderichin’s Kenzo (1998), part of the Fashion Memoir series, for focus and Yuniya Kawamura’s The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (2004) for background.