Word: takizawa
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...goateed, denim-clad Takizawa isn't the only highbrow designer teaming up with street-fashion labels in a high-low endeavor that has rocked Japan's fashion scene. Last year, the icon of Japanese haute expression, Yohji Yamamoto, joined forces with Adidas to sell a new line of sportswear, tagged Y-3. This month, Puma will showcase its latest sneaker collaboration with Yasuhiro Mihara, Japan's version of a younger, spikier Manolo Blahnik. Ironically, the decision of these high-fashion designers to come down from their ateliers and mix with the skateboard set is less their own than the imperative...
...galvanized a generation of faceless students, salarymen and office ladies to shed the uniforms they associate with the failure of the bubble years and probe unexplored fashion territory. "We've reached a point in Japanese society where people don't necessarily look up high for their fashion inspiration," says Takizawa. "In fact, even many older people have started to look to the street for inspiration, and that's making the whole culture more casual?and more creative...
...Takizawa embodies that casual creativity. Born in 1960, Issey Miyake's heir apparent has overseen rarefied collections with names like Pressed, Shade and Smoothed Edges. But even as he was earning accolades from the jet set, Takizawa says he was drawing his truest inspiration from a little swatch of antique denim fashioned during California's Gold Rush. "For people of my generation in Japan, denim represented freedom and individuality," says Takizawa. With more younger buyers crowding his store, Takizawa decided it was time to debut this most plebeian of fabrics on the runway. The loosely tailored jeans that resulted from...
...Such a mix-and-match attitude, Takizawa believes, is particularly suited to Japan. In places like Paris, high fashion is a luxury earned through maturity. But in Tokyo, it's a birthright. Gaggles of young women live at home, piling up enormous disposable incomes that make them the one bright spot in an otherwise moribund economy. With even high-school girls able to afford a Louis Vuitton handbag, the cachet of haute couture is rapidly wearing off. "People in Japan no longer feel they have to prove they're rich by wearing expensive labels," says Takizawa, who himself rarely wears...
...which characters like Doraemon, Hello Kitty and Pikachu adorn everything from refrigerators to boxes of seaweed sprinkles. Consumers, especially the key youth segment, prefer splashing out on recognizable icons?an almost Pavlovian response to a society awash in symbolism. No surprise then, that one of the details that Takizawa is most proud of in his collaboration with Champion is the way he reinterpreted the sweatshirt maker's embroidered "C" monogram into a tricolor abstraction. Shoemaker Mihara, too, stamped his sneakers with a cartoon rendition of Puma's feline logo on the soles?an anim?-inspired touch that has won plaudits...