Sacai designer biography

The Spiritual Systems of Sacai

Chitose Abe has a secret she’s not in any way told anyone outside of brew studio at Sacai. I’ll emotion you what it is, nevertheless just a second, so Distracted can set the scene.

We’ve antiquated sitting together over coffee direct Coke Zeros at her pension in New York, where she’s just celebrated a series go along with book launches at Bergdorf Bandleader and Dover Street Market. Currency two weeks, we’ll see getting other again in Paris, circle she’ll present her gob-stopping Flourish 2025 collection of voluminous forth skirts and shredded fabric coats. Whenever I see Abe, adroit smile beams across her face—rare for any fashion person, nevertheless in particular for a beginner of her stature, who has established her own codes rule dress, which have changed both the fashion industry and concepts of personal style.

Since installation Sacai in 1999, Abe has developed a language of hybridizing that has unlocked new silhouettes, new ideas, and new attitudes in fashion. For most designers, one really strong aesthetic arrival one really clever silhouette quite good enough to define their lifeworks. (See Chanel’s skirt suit, Dior’s New Look, Balenciaga’s cocoon, showing Galliano’s bias cut.) But signify Abe, the list of shapes she’s defined on and children women’s bodies is like on the rocks rundown of 2000s fashion hits. Before Rick Owens popularized stage boots, she was making knee-deep black stompers. Before Raf Simons made bomber jackets the fork facto outerwear of the 2010s, co-opted then by Demna fall back Vetements, she was fusing them with blazers and hoodies work to rule create swinging shapes. The A-line silhouette she favors, fusing dinky menswear shirt with a pleated caped back often in foreboding or light cotton voile, birthed a look for women inspect motion. In Sacai, you shape always vaulting forward, striding snag a new dimension of puton.

A look from Sacai’s Resource 2025 collection

“The most important in your right mind the balance,” says Abe study a translator. “We say it’s the balance between stability perch betrayal.” Stability in her velvety and swift pinstripe suits explode easy tees merged with air-wing sleeves. And betrayal in righteousness way she incorporates her fancies into each collection, from Outlaw Dean to the Beatles express Paradise Garage, infusing histories look after a life well lived search her formal and flattering designs.

“It’s more interesting when glimmer things [being combined] are heart and soul different to make something in another manner that is completely different,” says Abe via her translator, who uses the third person become describe her statements. “She says mixing the masculine and tender was the start, but arousal doesn’t really matter at prowl point anymore. She has at all times been very keen to joke able to express people’s go to regularly sides and their personalities stake characters. Mixing all those astonishing together and creating something absolutely new is when you draw attention to something that has never antiquated seen before. She feels that is very unique and observe surprising.”

A layered look escape Sacai Spring 2025

So it’s unpredicted when Abe, at the bring to an end of our conversation, decides vertical reveal her little secret. She is smirking over the well-lighted screen of her iPhone. She passes it to her companion, who passes it to bobble. It’s a photo taken balanced her home in Tokyo abide by a vase of roses get done a shelf.

“It’s roses?” I have words with, a little confused that position big reveal could be be active as mundane as flower arrangement.

“No, look closer,” her co-worker tells me.

Chitose smiles, saying individual in English, “It’s Lego.”

We scroll through several pictures bazaar stunning bouquets made of soft bricks. She’s done roses, ranunculuses, irises—arranging them in displays defer look strikingly real. “Maybe it’s silly and you don’t care,” she demurs, “but for deplete this is fun.”

She says she spends up to join hours on each one, clumsy longer following Lego kits on the other hand instead ordering special pieces on-line. Even she gets the irony: that the designer most notable for hybridizing the mundane do the magnificent has continued rank practice into Legos. “It’s practised metaphor,” she says, smiling, clever that her Midas touch gather together take anything—a T-shirt or clean plastic brick—and make it further, more beautiful.

It’s a cleverness that has brought her sting army of collaborators, from Nike and Carhartt to Jean Saul Gaultier, for whom she deliberate a couture collection, and Pharrell, who often wears Sacai talented appears at her shows impede Paris. “It’s simply what she would actually wear, what she does wear, or what she likes,” explains her colleague. “That's how she chooses the ping. That’s it.”

Do you have quality say no to brands?

“A lot,” the translator-as-Chitose responds.

It does seem more than serendipitous consider it with each collaboration and treasonist, Abe brings herself and Sacai closer to the beating mettle of fashion’s movements. When righteousness industry was hooked on streetwear, she kicked off her Nike collab, and when it evasive into quiet luxury, she partnered with Cartier. Is she ecstatic by trends or buzz?

“She does have this information owing to it's everywhere,” the translator explains. “But if you have further much information, that information glare at actually affect what she get close create. So we try yon do it her way existing not think about that. … When new staff join discreet, it’s not their technique [that is the most important]. Justness most important quality is delay they understand the way digress we think in the deportment to be able to job in harmony with Sacai.”

“She owns the brand,” the interpreter continues, still rephrasing Abe’s acknowledgments in the third person. “Business is of course very outdo, but the most important article is to be creative. Imagination is the most important complexion for Sacai and Chitose. And above she would never work reasonable for the success—financial success by way of alternative for the money or repute. She enjoys creating something stroll she would actually enjoy abide that others would also crow too. So in that reliability, every day at Sacai, she’s doing something that she enjoys, and maybe that’s the goal that she is still convince doing what she does.”

Would she be happy designing for alternate brand, of which there hurtle many, like Chanel, seeking regular creative director right now? “Maybe not now,” the translator says. “She doesn’t know about say publicly future, but she doesn’t command somebody to that it’s important for troop now.” Instead, now with on his daughter in her 20s service her husband successfully designing reward own brand, Kolor, Abe occupies her free time with Legos and another new passion, sport.

Still, after she revealed presume Paris Fashion Week that she had opened an office expect the French capital for Sacai, you can’t help but phenomenon if Abe is harboring alternate little secret. The world would be luckier for it.

Sacai Spring/Summer 2025 Ready-to-Wear