A new retrospective exhibition of Kenzo Takada, the Japanese fashion designer who lived in France for more than half a century, where he died of coronavirus in October 2020 at the age of 81, has opened its doors this weekend at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Titled Takada Kenzo, Chasing Dreams (Chasing Dreams) is a journey through the biography of an innovator who, shortly after arriving in Paris on January 1, 1965, launched a revolutionary proposal of loose silhouettes and vibrant floral motifs, present in both the Japanese kimono and African clothing.
“His dreams transcended borders, cultures and genders,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Sunao Fukushima. “Kenzo suggested a new style of clothing outside of Eurocentric cultural tradition,” she adds, citing Kenzo’s six-week voyage on a cargo ship to France, whose stops at ports in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Djibouti, Egypt and Spain helped him consolidate his eclectic concept of fashion.
A total of 83 original costumes, paintings, photographs and a film, as well as many dress sketches, reconstruct a biography marked by his personal motto: the world is beautiful. The Japanese designer appropriated shapes and prints typical of a minority, far removed from the Europe of that time, prostrate before the rigorous elegance of cinched waists and flat colours of Yves Saint Laurent and Dior. “He looked for common points between ethnic costumes from around the world and, of course, he also incorporated European traditions,” adds the curator. Fukushima points to the emblematic piece of the exhibition: a wedding dress made from hundreds of multicoloured ribbons bought by the designer over 20 years, often at the Paris Flea Market.
Asked about her favourite aspect of Kenzo’s fashion, one of the first visitors to the exhibition, Sae Suzuki, points to his way of combining bright colours. “He would put together loud colours and make them compatible through proportion and the way he would arrange them on a dress,” she says.
Kenzo was born in 1939 in Himeji, a city 90 kilometers west of Osaka, famous for having one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Japan. From a young age he was in direct contact with the floral exuberance of kimonos and their exquisite textures thanks to the fact that his family owned a tea house, a kind of exclusive tavern where music and dance performances were offered with geishas dressed in lavish versions of the Japanese national costume. He began studying Literature in the neighboring city of Kobe and abandoned them motivated by the inauguration of fashion courses open to men at the Bunka College of Fashion in Tokyo. In 1961, still as a student, he won the prestigious So-En fashion award with a two-piece ivory-colored suit inspired by Paris, accentuated with a blouse and a flowery hat in turquoise tones.
Later, he was hired by the Sanai department store and designed children’s clothing until he was told that the apartment where he lived would be demolished to make way for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The tenants would receive 11 months’ rent as compensation, which he decided to use to travel to Paris, and he chose the sea route on the recommendation of one of his teachers, who told him: “You will see many more things.”
His beginnings were not easy because, despite arriving in Europe in the midst of the boom of culture hippiewith his ideals of community life, peace and love, faced the challenge of being a foreigner from Asia trying to win the hearts of French fashion. He drew on his experience in commercial work and began selling clothing sketches in shops and major brands such as Louis Féraud.
In parallel, he worked on his personal designs and in 1970 he opened a shop in a tiny space in the Vivienne Gallery that he decorated himself with jungle motifs in the primitivist style of Henri Rousseau, known as The customs officer (1844-1910). The popularity of the store was helped by its appearance on the cover of She of one of her dresses sewn from fabrics with traditional Japanese motifs. The unusual staging for the time of a fashion show with many models jumping and dancing to enhance the volume of the clothes also helped.
The name of the store, Jungle Jap, was a reference to the union of his favorite concepts. It was also an unsuccessful attempt to rid the diminutive Jap of the pejorative connotation it had acquired in American English during World War II. Japanese civic groups in the United States protested its use, and in 1976, Kenzo turned to his given name as the brand under which he would develop a fruitful and lucrative career, also recognized in his adopted homeland with repeated institutional awards, including the knighthood of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1984.
He returned to Japan regularly to buy fabrics and, when he was already an established professional, he served as a judge at fashion competitions such as So-En. But his homeland was always France, the birthplace of his lifelong partner, Xavier de Castella, who died in 1990.
In 1993, Kenzo sold his brand to French fashion giant LVMH and focused on perfumery and decoration. Throughout his life, he also maintained close friendships with other great Japanese designers such as Junko Koshino, a classmate at Bunka College of Fashion, and Issey Miyake (1938-2022).
Fukushima, the curator of the exhibition, highlights the personality of an affable man who always exuded joy. She points to the black-and-white photograph of Kenzo in his first shop, perched on a ladder painting a mural with the triumphant expression of a naughty child who has gotten his way. “Half of his face was always taken up by that smile,” she recalls.
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