Kenzo Takada was born in 1939 in Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture. He was the first male student admitted to the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, graduating in 1960. He won the prestigious Shōgaku award in 1961, worked for Sanai department store in Tokyo, and in 1964 bought a one-way passage to Paris by freighter. The journey took thirty-three days. He arrived with twenty thousand yen and no French.

Jungle Jap

In April 1970, with the designer Atsuko Iijima, he opened a boutique in the Galerie Vivienne and called it Jungle Jap. The name — a deliberate reclamation, he said — drew complaints immediately; he kept it for a decade. His first collection was shown at the shop itself; the press attended because Takada had personally hand-delivered photographs of his designs to Elle and Vogue in the weeks before. The clothes — layered tunics over wide trousers, floral prints on cotton muslin, cap sleeves and gathered waists — sold out within a week.

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I did not come to Paris to learn from Paris. I came because I wanted Paris to learn from me. — Kenzo Takada

The Vocabulary

Kenzo's designs through the 1970s and 1980s drew deliberately from sources outside both Japan and France: Peruvian ponchos, Russian peasant dresses, Scandinavian knits, African prints, Mexican huipils. He argued that fashion's vocabulary had been too narrowly Parisian, and that a globally-drawn wardrobe was both intellectually and commercially more interesting. The subsequent forty years of Paris fashion have, broadly, agreed.

The LVMH Sale and Return

In 1993 Kenzo sold his house to LVMH and retired from design in 1999, at sixty. He spent his retirement painting and staging art exhibitions. He continued, intermittently, to consult on capsule collections. He died on 4 October 2020 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, of COVID-19 complications, at 81.

The house has been run since by Antonio Marras (2003–2011), Humberto Leon and Carol Lim (2011–2019), Felipe Oliveira Baptista (2020–2021), and Nigo (2021–), each extending different facets of Takada's original globalist proposition.