Word: takizawa
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...stage is all that separates heaven from hell. For decades, Japan's fashion designers have treated the thin glass of their storefront windows as an equally inviolate divider, cleaving the cool, exclusionary aesthetic of their boutiques from the rowdy street fashion of the teens preening outside. But enter Naoki Takizawa's sleek, stark space in Tokyo's fashionable Roppongi Hills neighborhood and the soaring glass wall seems less a barrier than an instrument for osmosis. Among his latest designs for haute-couture label Issey Miyake?fanciful blouses and blazers inspired by the flourishes of baroque furniture?mingle a more prosaic...
...delicate collar of cherry blossoms nodding on long, slender stems. Then, to the melancholy strains of a live string orchestra, others follow in puffed coats so intricately puckered and gathered that models look encased in origami cocoons. The collection, the fourth by Issey Miyake's heir apparent Naoki Takizawa, creates an effect so mesmerizing that, for a moment, even the most hard-nosed store buyers forget niggling practicalities like what happens if you sit while furled in those brilliantly colored coats? "It was so beautiful, it made everyone cry," Susan Koller, fashion editor of the French magazine Self-Service, tells...
...legacy of avant-garde experimentation been passed down. Rei Kawakubo's promising protégé Junya Watanabe is one of the few who lives up to expectations. He showed a futuristic punk look in Paris that most critics loved though it struck some as retro. Even Miyake's Takizawa, one of the most successful of the younger generation, has not strayed far from the established aesthetics of the house. Ask a European or an American fashion editor to name a fresh, up-and-coming Japanese face and you get only silence. A Japanese fashion editor will tell you which...
...Takizawa does greet the mostly Japanese well-wishers after his show; two days later, while waiting for Akira Onozuka's Zucca show to begin, he goes virtually unnoticed. Compare that with the presence of Tom Ford, creative director of the Gucci Group, who caused major gridlock at the Les AnnEes de Pop opening at the Pompidou Center. "They don't have the sex factor," Self-Service's Koller says of the Japanese designers. "Fashion today is about being a pop star...
...spent $500,000 in a futile search for contracts. Says he: "We wouldn't have stayed all this time if we hadn't been encouraged by government bureaucrats who said, 'Be patient, you'll eventually succeed.' " Fed up with meaningless reassurances, Neumaier braced Hiroo Takizawa, the MITI environmental guidance director. Takizawa conceded that Japan intended to protect its own. Said he: "The Japanese government believes that it is very important to nourish Japan's knowledge and technology industries and has been trying to develop its own think tanks." From now on, Neumaier intends...