The Japanese fashion designer who founded Kenzo died of headaches for Covid-19 in a hospital near Paris.
A spokesman for prominent designer showed the death of Kenzo Takada just 4 days after his eponymous logo featured his spring/summer 2021 collection at Paris Fashion Week.
Although he left the logo in 1999 for “permanent vacation,” the 81-year-old man was still concerned about maintaining the Kenzo symbol and wore K3, the luxury home and lifestyle items logo he introduced last January, nearly 50 years after founding the fashion logo, Jungla Jap, later known as Kenzo.
Takada was born on February 27, 1939, in Himeji, Japan, to hoteliers, and developed a love of fashion at an early age through reading her sisters’ fashion magazines.
After placing one of the first male academics to examine at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, he moved to Paris at the age of 26 to work as an independent designer.
Although he only intended to stay in Paris for a few months, he remained there for a long time, and five years later, in the spring of 1970, he used only $200 in cloth to create his first fashion collection.
This is the birth of Kenzo, as we know him today, and his designs temporarily earned him a reputation as one of the most vital designers who emerged from Paris in the 1970s.
It was one of the first disruptors: presenting spring collections in the spring, that next season, encouraging others to buy what they see well forty-five years before the retail style is no longer widely adopted.
That same year, he took over a Parisian boutique and presented his garments in the canopy of Elle magazine. Takada even organized ready-to-use fashion exhibitions in the store during the sewing season, years before the concept of pr’t-a-porter (around 1976) began.
As her Japanese-inspired creations continued to attract global buyers, Takada continued to call for herself by organizing fashion shows in circus tents and riding elephants on catwalks to finish her catwalks.
Kenzo then acquired through luxury goods conglomerate LMVH in 1993, joining who-who luxury brands such as Fendi, Givenchy and Marc Jacobs.
Takada won a Legion of Honor (the honor of military and/or civil merit) in 2016, followed by the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 55th Fashion Editors’ Club of Japan Awards in 2017.
Journalist and award-winning blogger of everything that looks like culture: write about trends before they become global, innovation before advertising and the long term before
Award-winning journalist and blogger of everything that resembles culture: write about trends before they become global, innovation before it’s advertising, and the long run before it happens.