Kenzo Nigo’s First Look, Where Outfits Be The Stars Of The Show

“There was a floral pattern that I had never seen before. Great stuff that doesn’t repeat itself as a brand moves to a bigger, say more successful, phase. A lot of the early forms were very experimental in a way that wasn’t the case with many brands in the ’80s,” he said. “I found some of those ideas interesting too.”

For her fall 2022 debut, floral prints and some of Takada’s own sketches from the 1970s were remade on clothing and accessories. Other ideas from the Kenzo archive, such as Harris tweed sewing and scarf-meets-snood collars, were reintroduced, while Nigo’s own obsessions such as Ivy League style and Aka-e pottery emerged as motifs. The silhouettes are very layered, not only literally, but with references that bridge East-West cultures. Some pieces refer to the structure of the kimono. “The stylists had tied it up in a logical way to tie two strings, but to me, it just felt so wrong. While showing everyone how to do things that came from traditional Japanese dress at the time, I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m really Japanese,’” she said with a smile. “I don’t think many people understand what Kenzo means in terms of clothing—that’s what I wanted to focus on and grab people’s attention while I was working at the label.”

Here she touches on something that, even if some intonation is lost in translation, feels like a thorn in the way the fashion system, and especially its marketing arm, is working now. “My goal at Kenzo—but I think in principle it should be the goal of everyone in fashion—is for the ultimate collection where I devote most of my creative energy to being something, even in commercial terms. , the core driver of the business and what people are most interested in,” he said. Not a collaboration. Not drops. Not fanfare or celebrity or hype. “We are entering a period when the main collection is kind of the backdrop,” he continued, “and only collaboration generates interest or sales, which, to me, feels like the wrong approach.” This is from the man who effectively spearheaded collaborations in fashion, bringing KAWS and Futura into the fashion world and extending his own reach to product design and cafes in Japan.