By the point the ultimate look from Kenzo’s spring 2023 assortment appeared on the runway final June, the model’s creative director, Tomoaki Nagao—higher identified by his moniker, Nigo—was already creating a complete new line for the next season. That type of overlap, Nigo explains to me over Zoom, is a pure a part of his inventive course of.
The OG multihyphenate, now 52 years outdated, has spent a long time within the trend, music, artwork, and design industries. He first turned a cult streetwear determine together with his Japanese label A Bathing Ape, which he launched from his Shibuya clothes retailer in 1993. He then went on to work with Marc Jacobs and Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, together with Pharrell, with whom he helms the menswear model Billionaire Boys Membership; in 2010, Nigo launched one more streetwear firm referred to as Human Made. On the subject of music, he’s collaborated with A$AP Rocky; Tyler, the Creator, and Child Cudi; his debut album, I KNOW NIGO—a nod to those that drop his identify on the threshold of VIP sections all around the world—featured these rap-game heavyweights and lots of extra. Whether or not as a producer, a DJ, a designer, or a collaborator, Nigo has cultivated an inventory of followers and followers that rival most of as we speak’s hottest purple carpet tip sheets.
However the newest (and arguably most important) feather in his cap got here in September 2021, when Nigo was appointed the place of creative director for Kenzo—the primary, the truth is, since founder Kenzo Takada retired in 1999. Since then, Kenzo has turn out to be one thing of a life’s-work venture for Nigo. Over the course of two years and three collections, the designer has fused his personal American-workwear-meets-street signatures with Kenzo’s prep-school, print-heavy home codes—to joyous and youthful impact. The autumn 2023 season expanded upon that basis, with 60 seems debuting at his January present in Paris alongside a stay string quartet performing songs from The Beatles’ White Album. Though technically a males’s present, the presentation featured seems for all genders: pleated skirts worn over wide-leg pants, dimpled vests layered on high of superlong sweaters, denim overalls, knitted balaclavas, shearling leather-based coats, and outsized takes on the traditional enterprise go well with.
The one distinction this time round, Nigo tells me by means of a translator, was the analysis course of. The designer has been a dutiful pupil of Kenzo’s historical past since his appointment as creative director, spending his time in deep dialog with the maison’s archive division, leafing by means of present notes, images and paraphernalia related to earlier collections, sketches, and, after all, clothes from the Seventies on. However his third and newest assortment bears explicit significance—as a result of it’s the one one to date that he’s been capable of method with the data of what sells in shops.
“I may really get some actual suggestions on how individuals had been reacting to the collections,” he says, talking from his residence in Tokyo only a few days after the autumn 2023 runway presentation came about. “Within the first present, I launched some parts of conventional Japanese clothes by means of kimono varieties. Instinctively, I felt that will make sense for Kenzo, however I wasn’t certain how that will go down. Would individuals have an interest? However it really appears to have been actually widespread, and the response from clients has confirmed my feeling.”
That concept—merging classical Japanese trend with Western influences—is on the coronary heart of each Nigo and Takada’s design imaginative and prescient. Each males had been born and raised in Japan, however made clothes out of a Paris atelier for a Paris-based label. And, as Nigo factors out, Japanese trend typically performs round with icons of Americana. However the level of being creative director at Kenzo isn’t to make what Nigo describes as “Nigo for Kenzo,” nor to outright copy Takada’s designs. Fairly, the hope is to “take his method, and make fashionable garments which can be a synthesis of varied influences” so that every season’s choices don’t really feel like a repeat of earlier collections.
Thematically talking, although, every bit of clothes comprises echoes of Kenzo’s roots. Each month, the designer travels to Paris to spend a couple of week within the studio to work with the workforce—and asks the Kenzo archivists to point out him issues he “wasn’t conscious of,” as Nigo places it. “I’ve my very own private assortment of classic Kenzo items that I’ve collected over time, which varieties the premise of my entry into understanding Kenzo,” he provides. “I’ll ask the archivists a couple of sure interval that I don’t learn about they usually’ll have the ability to ship items from their warehouse.” (One such piece: Kenzo’s suiting material from the Nineteen Eighties, which ended up inspiring a dazzle stripe motif Nigo used on wool jacquard suiting and printed denim for fall 2023.) Nigo says that, by means of his analysis, he’s been stunned by the very first reveals that Takada mounted again within the Seventies. They had been, the truth is, fairly experimental. “I don’t see [that] mirrored within the later interval of the model,” Nigo says. “However that’s been informative in understanding the liberty that may exist inside Kenzo.”
In fact, regardless of the autumn 2023 present closing only one week in the past, Nigo is already knee-deep in his plans for the place to take the model subsequent. By which path will he take it? What does he hope to attain within the subsequent assortment? As all the time, he says he’s trying forward whereas concurrently protecting his eye skilled firmly upon the rearview mirror, paying homage to the previous.
“Manufacturers are inclined to age with their creators,” he explains. “[Technically, that makes] Kenzo comparatively middle-aged. That’s not true to the roots of the model, which ought to all the time enchantment to younger individuals. My overriding theme is that the model should return to this concept: it belongs in a zone that appeals to younger individuals. That’s the essence of my venture.”