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Kenzo Takada, one of the first Japanese designers to become popular in the West, died at the age of 81 on Sunday, October 4, in a Paris hospital where he was admitted for the coronavirus. Simply called Kenzo, he came from Japan to Paris in 1964, where he planned to stay for six months and where he stayed for 56 years. He was comfortable with the urgency of revolutionizing fashion, freeing it from the rigid solemnity of haute couture (haute couture, that is, elaborate and beautiful clothes made to measure) and making it fun and light. His clothes had animal prints, floral prints and bright colors; fashion shows were shows with models almost dancing, which he concluded on the back of an elephant: “Fashion is not for a few, it is for everyone. You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, ”he told al New York Times.
Kenzo was born in Himeji, near Osaka, on February 27, 1939: he was one of the seven children of Kenji and Shizu Takada, who ran a hotel. He became interested in fashion by flipping through his sisters’ magazines, enrolled in the Kobe University College of Literature to please his parents, who disapproved of a career as a designer, dropped out, and became one of the first male students of Bunka fashion academy. in Tokyo. In 1960 he won the Soen Award, which since 1956 had opened its doors to emerging designers: “I won it in a two-piece dress with a single white button. It was a confident job, with a blouse underneath and a belt on top, both in turquoise, ”he recalled. He started working designing clothes for girls in the Sanai department store and his life changed thanks to working for the 1964 Olympics: his apartment was destroyed to make way for new projects and he received 10 months’ rent as compensation. He used them for a boat trip that touched Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai and took him to France. He rented a house in Paris, which “was dark, cold, nothing like what you saw in magazines.”
In Paris, Kenzo made a living selling clothing sketches to haute couture designers. In 1970 he opened a small boutique, Jungle Jap, in the Galerie Vivienne, not far from the Palais-Royal, with floral walls painted by himself, inspired by Henri Rousseau’s Dream: “He wanted to merge the two things he loved: the jungle and Japan, “he told al Financial times. Her clothes were innovative and playful, with original proportions and enlarged volumes also thanks to the use of cotton. They were liberators, very different from those of Western designers, a predominant model also in Japan: “it didn’t make sense that I too did what French designers did, I didn’t even know how to do it. So I started designing clothes in different ways, using kimono fabrics and different sources of inspiration, ”he told the South China morning post in 2019.
Success came immediately, in 1971, when the fashion magazine She published one of his works on the front page and when the show organized in his store attracted fashion journalists from all over the world. Kenzo did not have agreements with the fabric factories and all his clothes were sewn by hand he and his collaborators: “I had no money, so I went to buy the fabrics at the Marché St Pierre in Paris, I took the fabrics brought from Japan and sewed together ».
He became famous under the nickname of The Jap, which was not a problem in Paris but in the United States, because the name was considered offensive and was reminiscent of hostility against the Japanese during World War II. “I was planning to call the Jungle Shop Something. Jungle Jap sounded good, it was ingenious, “Kenzo told al New York Times two years after its opening. “I knew it had a derogatory meaning, but I also thought that if I did something good, that meaning would change.” When he arrived in America, Kenzo was denounced by the League of Japanese American Citizens, who asked him to change his name; He was not convicted, but since then the company has been advertised in the country as JAP while the word Kenzo appears on clothing labels; In 1976 it became the official name of the brand, after a show in New York in 1976.
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Fashion shows were another of his strong points. She organized them in her store where she offered ready-to-wear clothes (prepackaged) during the week of haute couture. 50 years before the so-called see-now-buy-now, it had clothes for spring on display in spring (and not six months earlier, in fall, as it was then); He was also one of the first to propose unisex clothing, eroding the boundary between men’s and women’s fashion. The shows were spectacular and memorable: in 1977 he organized one at the legendary Studio 54, the Manhattan nightclub where you had to go and be seen, with Grace Jones and Jerry Hall as models; the 1979 one was housed in a circus tent and ended with a group of women in transparent dresses on horseback and Kenzo on an elephant.
In 1983 he introduced men’s clothing, in 1986 a line of jeans, in 1988 perfumes and furniture. Then 1990 “was the most difficult year of my life, when my business partner Xavier and my business partner died.” For this reason, in 1993 Kenzo sold the company for $ 80 million to LVMH, the largest French luxury group owned by Bernard Arnault, which also includes Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi and Céline. He worked for the company for a few more years, then retired from the world of fashion in 1999, at the age of 60, after a commemorative show with the models of the moment. Among the creative directors that have alternated were Antonio Marras, the couple Carol Lim and Humberto León and, currently, Felipe Oliveira Baptista, who has just presented the new collection, dedicated to flowers and bees, at Fashion Week in Paris. .
After leaving the company, Kenzo designed the costumes for the opera and uniforms for the Japanese Olympic team in 2004 and devoted himself to furniture until he founded the K3 brand in 2020: he sells rugs, curtains, ceramics, prints. luxury wallpaper and home textiles. “Fashion is like food: you don’t always have to prepare from the same menu,” he said.
With his work, Kenzo paved the way to Paris for other Japanese designers, such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto: the latter was shown two days ago, during Paris Fashion Week, while Kawakubo did not present the collection in France. of its Comme des Garçons brand for the first time in 39 years, but it will do so with small shows and presentations in Tokyo. Contrary to his style – geometric, severe, experimental and often in dark colors, Kenzo’s was bright, exuberant and vital: «I remember it – writes the fashion critic Suzy Menkes – when she told me she wanted to design ‘happy’ clothes. She was referring to color, full of freedom for the female body and with a very advanced international taste.
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