“He brought us colors and freedom to our silhouettes,” said French President Emmanuel Macron last month, offering condolences to fashion designer Kenzo Takada’s friends and family. The founder of the eponymous Kenzo brand passed away at the age of 81 on Oct. 4 after contracting COVID-19. Takada was the first Japanese designer to gain international success out of Paris’s competitive fashion industry, standing at the frontline of the then-novel production concept of the time, ready-to-wear, making a wide variety of designs accessible and affordable.
“Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Kansai Yamamoto and many Japanese talents emerged in Paris fashion week from the ’80s, and Takada was a pioneer in paving the way for Japanese designers in Paris,” says Seijiro Ogawa, a veteran fashion journalist who reported on Paris fashion news from the ’70s to the ’80s. “A leading Japanese department store in importing haute couture, Seibu, started to look at emerging ready-to-wear talent in the ’70s and invited a group of designers to Japan. One of them was Takada, which was a triumphant return for him,” Ogawa continues. “He was showered with attention. I remember he was never the one to explain himself verbally, but spoke through colors and flowers.”
Takada enrolled in Bunka Fashion College in 1958 as one of the first male students to attend a fashion school in Japan. After graduating as an honor student — his graduating class was nicknamed hana no kyūki sei (“Flowering Ninth Class”) for its cohort of outstanding talent, including Junko Koshino and Mitsuhiro Matsuda, who went on to shape Japan’s modern fashion industry — Takada leaped on an opportunity to take his skills to Paris in 1964, when the Tokyo Olympics liberalized travel for Japanese citizens. Takada rapidly emerged in Paris’s fashion scene, dropping in on prestigious establishments, from galleries to magazine offices to department stores, to sell sketches when he exhausted his travel fund.