The Hindu Business Line : Style samurai

Six years ago, Kenzo Takada announced his retirement from the shimmer and shine of high-street fashion, riding into the sunset atop an elephant after an all-night party at a Paris theatre where belly dancers kept pace with the flow of champagne. But the man who made the world's fashion capital embrace the East is back to doing what he does best.

"With 30 years of fashion behind it, my business was growing bigger and bigger, and I was getting tired. I needed to take a break," Takada said, taking a break from the Luxury Hotels of the World powwow in New Delhi. "But after a couple of years, my fingers started itching," the creator of the best-selling perfume named after him added with a broad smile, his face looking a good 10 years younger than 65.

It is difficult to stay outside the limelight, improving your golf handicap and indulging your passion for travel, when you've designed clothes for famously beautiful women, such as Princess Caroline of Monaco, Isabelle Adjani (Kenzo would have to close his store whenever she would show up) and Catherine Deneuve (the French actress lived in Kenzo's loose-fitting clothes during her pregnancy).

It was Kenzo's show that opened New York's unabashedly hedonistic but short-lived nightclub in 1977, when Grace Jones sang in his honour. He now swings to the music of Jean Michel Jarre, emperor of techno, who's like a walking advertisement for Kenzo.

Even Princess Diana wore Kenzo outfits on her honeymoon, as the designer woke up one fine morning to discover from the day's newspapers. Such surprises aren't uncommon for a designer who, along with Karl Lagerfeld and Sonia Rykiel, made fashion accessible to a larger market by presenting the first prêt-a-porter (ready-to-wear) collection, way back in 1973. Today, as a result, "famous and not-so-famous people" can both wear clothes carrying big fashion label. It is prêt, by the way, that has given high fashion its reason for existence after the market for haute couture shrunk to about 1,500 high-society hostesses, split equally between Europe and the US.

Back to the spotlight

In the past couple of years, Kenzo has designed special packaging for Diet Coke cans and launched the new "accessible luxury" label, Gokan Kobo (which means `workshop of the five senses'), lending his touch to just about everything, from playing cards and breezy beachwear to Baccarat crystal. One of the Gokan Kobo outfits even re-invents the sari. "I have visited India six or seven times, yet I feel I haven't seen enough," Kenzo says with obvious admiration. "Indian fabrics, patterns and embroideries are treasures for fashion designers."

In the middle of all this, Kenzo is also embroiled in a legal battle with French billionaire Bernard Arnault's LVMH luxury empire for allegedly misusing the Kenzo logo. The designer sold his eponymous label to LVMH in 1993, remaining its fashion director till the end of 1999; the label however remains Kenzo.

In New Delhi, he was talking about different perceptions of luxury to his audience comprising the world's top hoteliers. He started his presentation with pictures of the swimming pool in his living room at his apartment in the centre of Paris. Most people would regard this as the ultimate style statement, but for Kenzo it means plugging leaks and stopping seepages. But no matter how hard he tries to underplay the fact with his shy smile and few words, it has been a long journey for the son of teahouse owners since the time he landed in Marseilles on January 1, 1965.

He was one of the first male students to enrol in Tokyo's prestigious Bunka Fashion College. The designer left his hometown Himeji, whose famous castle, as Kenzo said over a cup of double espresso in New Delhi, figures in Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa's films. In Tokyo, Kenzo painted houses to finance his education.

One-way ticket

His Japanese friends in Paris told him he had no future in the French fashion industry, but Kenzo had only a one-way ticket, which he had bought with the compensation he got after his Tokyo home was razed to make way for an Olympic stadium. "I said I'll stay for six months and check out the market," he says now. He didn't have to pack his bags ever again. Before the six months were over, Louis Feraud, who was a name to reckon with in the Paris of the 1960s, bought five of the 30 sketches that Kenzo was showing around. Elle magazine's fashion editor, meanwhile, gave addresses of places where he could sell his designs. That was enough for Kenzo to stay back and launch his career as design consultant.

Interestingly, in the same year, across the Atlantic, another as-yet-unknown Japanese designer, Hanae Mori, wowed New York with her East Meets West fashion show.

The tradition of Japonism, or designs inspired by Japanese minimalism, had fascinated the West ever since the two civilisations came in contact after Japan had ended centuries of isolation in the mid-1800s. Kenzo took this tradition to its next logical step by opening a dialogue between the two cultures.

He introduced a fresh and seductive note to Paris high fashion by styling, for instance, the classic tweed suit as a kimono jacket paired with cropped trousers, or by combining Japanese cuts with Slavic embroidery for women's wear.

Fashion's global face

In 1970 (the same year Giorgio Armani presented his first collection in Milan and Elio Fiorucci introduced designer jeans), Kenzo opened his Jungle Jap boutique at Galerie Vivienne; in April, he was on the cover of the French fashion magazine Elle, then of the American edition of Vogue, an enviable achievement for a new designer.

His clothes were loose and casual, he enlarged armholes and broadened shoulders, and he used 100 per cent cotton fabric. When Kenzo showcased the khaki cotton shirtdress in 1977, it seemed revolutionary. Within years, however, big belted shirts and short skirts were to become durable features of fashion.

"I like black and white," the magician of colour said as he watched, from the rooftop club of a five-star hotel in New Delhi, miles of greenery basking in the soft autumn sun. "But fortunately for us, fashion moves in cycles, which is a very human thing. Colour is back in fashion, so is femininity, so is seduction. Fashion must help us fantasise because we need to dream."

In a working life spanning 40 years, Kenzo has scoured the world for inspiration — from Spanish boleros and Chinese tunics to Indian trousers and Bedouin blankets, Kenzo has chosen elements that would define what critics called "global timelessness". With his use of brightly coloured and patterned fabrics, wrapped and layered garments inspired by the kimono, the Japanese designer re-wrote the rules that dictated the monochromatic palette of high fashion.

By the time Kenzo held his second big show in 1972 at Gare d'Orsay, the railway station that is a famous art museum today, the turnout was so unexpectedly large that he had to cancel the event mid-way.

Kenzo named his first perfume, unveiled in 1979, King Kong after Hollywood's favourite ape.

If you think it's an odd name for a perfume, here's what Kenzo says: "King Kong is a classic. He is big and he is strong."

In 1988, he launched Kenzo de Kenzo, the feminine and floral perfume that brought a Japanese sensibility to French perfumery, and now the dozen-odd perfumes that bear his stamp have become cash machines for LVMH, which owns over 50 luxury brands, from Dom Perignon champagne to Louis Vuitton bags and Dior perfumes.

It is 40 years since Kenzo landed in Marseilles on a bitterly cold morning and more than two decades since a group of 12 Japanese designers presented their prêt collections in Paris. In the intervening years, Japan's influence on the fashion industry has grown to such an extent that the stock values of LVMH slide whenever the yen slips.

Japanese buyers today account for 32 per cent of Gucci's and 45 per cent of LVMH worldwide sales. Yet, ironically, Japan still doesn't have a homespun fashion powerhouse of the stature of Kenzo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto or Comme des Garcon.

With Kenzo promising to devote his life to discovering new talent and nurturing them, we may yet see the seeds of this entity being sown. Kenzo is confident it will happen within his lifetime. "Japanese culture is very deep," he says. "And we're no longer as influenced by European fashion as we used to be."