Sacai (Q3578)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Sacai is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Sacai |
Sacai is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
1999
creative designer
Waiting for the Sacai show to start today, you got the distinct sense that it had graduated from an insider cult favorite to a global super brand, with a front row full of on-the-rise celebrities in Chitose Abe’s avant-garde designs. The longtime Sacai admirer in me felt a unique blend of territoriality and pride.Backstage Abe was reflecting on her 25 years in business. Reaching a milestone like that might put some in a valedictory mood—somebody’s always celebrating an anniversary somewhere—but Abe seemed more ambitious than ever, and I’m not talking about that influencer-heavy front row. “I wanted to create the familiar archetype into something completely new by going back to Sacai’s origin,” she said through her interpreter.While her collection was rooted in the classic wardrobe elements it often features—peacoats, marinière sweaters, trenches, army-surplus jackets—the pieces had a particularly French flavor, with flourishes lifted from couture. Abe said she’d “finally” opened a Paris office for Sacai, ”so maybe that’s reflected [in the clothes].”A seatmate said the gold SA embroidered monogram on a coat pocket reminded him of YSL. For me, it was the silky white shirt collars that gave the show its Parisian spirit. There were other elevating details, too, like the bustles embellishing a pair of boxy striped tees, the sheer panels inset into the shoulders and backs of chunky speckle knit sweaters, and the deep pile of multicolor fringe used for miniskirts and a chubby coat that evoked fur as well as or better than the faux stuff.The collection’s high point came at the end, with a trio of evening looks that put Abe’s pattern and cutting gifts on vivid display. Deconstructions of Le Smoking, they looked black tie appropriate but utterly unconventional, in true Sacai fashion.
30 September 2024
James Dean giving his best rebel stare appeared on a T-shirt early in this Sacai collection. It wasn’t just his brooding beauty that turned on Chitose Abe this season. Backstage she said she fell for a quote attributed to the famous actor: “I think the prime reason for existence, for living in this world, is discovery.” Dean’s own path of discovery was cut brutally short when he died in a car accident, on his way to a racing competition, at just 24. Abe’s journey is ongoing. “She’s been doing this job for 25 years now,” her interpreter said backstage, “but she still feels she can do more, she wants to discover more.”Her zest for remixing was not diminished on the runway, but because the building blocks of the collection were classics of 1950s American style—Dean’s era—it felt more essential and less experimental than her collections sometimes do. Preppy, in its way, but with a Sacai twist. The red Harrington jacket Dean wore so well, inRebel Without a Cause, for example, was oversized, as were the chinos worn with it, which also featured an inner waistband with the brand logo peeking out above a nylon webbed belt. Other pants were cut with deep slant hip pockets that produced a strong silhouette, pleasingly familiar but refreshed.Denim came in for a good deal of reinvention. Levi’s jean jackets were nipped, tucked, and pleated into eye-catching shapes for guys, and on the girls’ side they were spliced with jeans to make a denim shirtdress and a denim jumpsuit of extreme proportions. Abe also hooked up with WTAPS, a cult Japanese streetwear brand known for military garb, and had some fun with army uniforms. Architectural shoulders added extra swag to a woman’s field jacket, a motif carried over to leather perfectos and double-breasted checked blazers. Fun was also the name of the game with a racing car print that was spied on Pharrell Williams, a front-row guest.A few of the models carried a pile of books secured with a strap, the way teenagers of the 1950s did, back when they walked to school uphill. Back when teens actually read books. Abe seemed to be tapping into something universal with this collection. Ivy style, which is another strain of this look, has been trending all season. When the future feels scary, we tend to look to the past, though Abe, who is an optimist by nature, doesn’t necessarily see things that way. When asked why the 1950s now, she said, “I just like James Dean’s freedom.”
23 June 2024
A well-known magazine editor pulled out a leather perfecto and herringbone tweed riding jacket hybrid from Chitose Abe’s fall 2013 Sacai collection and was seen wearing it around Fashion Week. Abe has been hybridizing garments—making pieces that look like one thing coming, and another thing going, or merging disparate elements into one item of clothing—for 25 years. She’s a Japanese institution in Paris, but her show today felt like a breakthrough.Backstage afterwards, she said her instinct was to convince people to dress up more, and she meant that literally. Each and every one of the 47 looks she sent down the runway was a dress. The trench with the checked silk handkerchief layers underneath—all one piece. The black field jacket and white stand-up collar button-down—all one piece. The pinstripe blazer and windowpane plaid check kilt—well, you get the idea. The dress as a concept sounds straightforward enough, but when you consider the pattern-making that went into rendering these multilayered looks as single—and singular—garments, you can’t help but be wowed.And as for the tuxedo pants with the silk stripes down the outside of the legs, those weren’t pants at all, but, as some of the pictures make clear, over-the-knee stacked heel boots combined with the bottom halves of trousers. Abe’s pantaboots, as we will settle for calling them until someone comes up with something different and better, were the most extreme versions of a look that’s been percolating elsewhere this season (Balenciaga and Fendi, for example) and one that a noted retailer said afterwards they were excited about the sale potential of.Abe’s two-things-at-once mash-ups have proven influential across the spectrum of fashion, and made her incredibly successful. This season’s trapeze shapes and military-slash-preppy references were familiar parts of her vocabulary, and the results were recognizably Sacai, but her process seemed to be about a self-set challenge to break her own rules. That kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough in fashion, especially in this moment when creativity is falling into second place behind caution. Maybe that’s why the room felt so energized. As the crowd dispersed, a different editor observed, “Chitose is arealdesigner.”
4 March 2024
“Shocking and unexpected things happened while I was designing this collection,” Chitose Abe reflected (through a translator) after her men’s fall and women’s pre-fall collections had taken to the runway in Paris. “I feel grateful to have a simple, happy life, and so I really wanted to give a united message of love to everyone.” She’d thought about the worduniformand broken it down intouni-form. For her, the semantics worked both ways. She was wearing a T-shirt embroidered with “One Love,” with a pictogram of a hand with its index finger pointing up at the wearer.There were more of the same dotted around the show. The idea of uni-form naturally has another meaning in Abe’s work. She’s renowned for having started hybridizing garments from different genres (initially from her home in Tokyo, as far back as the millennium )—a method that’s influenced fashion ever since. This season her uniting of garments produced a continuous flow of outerwear, mixing up puffers, trench coats, Fair Isle knitwear, tweed, and leather biker jackets.Her credibility within the menswear scene has brought her collaborations with both Carhartt and the skateboard and streetwear pioneer and artist Mark Gonzales. Sacai x Gonzales embroidered patches were emblazoned on many of her jackets, collegiate style, in sync with the Americana trend that has been running rife across this season’s men’s shows.Sacai’s complicated silhouettes and exaggerated volumes defy detailed descriptions. An exception was a single duffle coat, its classic toggle fastenings simply shifted to one side—this looked great.In the womenswear, there was also a lot going on, chiefly in twisted asymmetric knits, balloon-sleeve silhouettes, and vertically shredded and zippered dress constructs—a foretaste of the show she’ll put on during the women’s season just around the corner.
21 January 2024
“Shocking and unexpected things happened while I was designing this collection,” Chitose Abe reflected (through a translator) after her men’s fall and women’s pre-fall collections had taken to the runway in Paris. “I feel grateful to have a simple, happy life, and so I really wanted to give a united message of love to everyone.” She’d thought about the word ‘uniform’ and broken it down into “Uni-form.” For her, the semantics worked both ways. She was wearing a T-shirt embroidered with ‘One Love,” with a pictogram of a hand with its index finger pointing up at the wearer.There were more of the same dotted around the show. The idea of uni-form naturally has another meaning in Abe’s work. She’s renowned for having started hybridizing garments from different genres (initially from her home in Tokyo, as far back as the millennium )—a method that’s influenced fashion ever since. This season her uniting of garments produced a continuous flow of outerwear, mixing up puffas, trench coats, Fair Isle knitwear, tweed and leather biker jackets.Her credibility within the menswear scene has brought her collaborations with both Carhartt and the skateboard and streetwear pioneer and artist Mark Gonzalez. Sacai x Gonzalez embroidered patches were emblazoned on many of her jackets, collegiate style, in sync with the Americana trend which has been running rife across this season’s men’s shows.Sacai’s complicated silhouettes and exaggerated volumes defy detailed description. An exception was a single duffle coat, its classic toggle fastenings simply shifted to one side—this looked great.In the womenswear, there was also a lot going on, chiefly in twisted asymmetric knits, balloon sleeved silhouettes and vertically-shredded and zippered dress constructs; a foretaste of the show she’ll put on during the women’s season just around the corner.
21 January 2024
“The more simple we are, the more complete we become.” Has Sacai’s Chitose Abe been normal-pilled too, like many of her designer peers? After 15 years of hybrids, she played it straighter than usual this season, or at least as straight as a slouched-on jacket with slashes for pockets where skin peeks out can be.It’s useful to know that it was Auguste Rodin who said the words that were printed across a couple of T-shirts in this collection. The groundbreaking French artist made sculptures with complex, uneven, ‘emotional’ surfaces. Abe may have been preaching simplicity, but there was still a lot of play and experimentation here.Pillowy volumes were her chief preoccupation. Jacket and shirt sleeves were sewn with arching seams, creating a side-to-side silhouette that’s almost circular, and the bodies of the pieces were bisected by another seam that produced their round shape front-to-back. The way they were constructed gave them undulating hems, sometimes exposing a flash of midriff. As generous as the clothes look in these pictures, typically there was even more volume at the rear of garments. A trench and shirtdress had watteau backs.Though Abe was working with a lot of material, the vibe wasn’t prim. The slashes that stood in for pockets in an early jacket became a running motif. On the final look—a long narrow dress in menswear pinstripes and black silk—she added extra slashes below the hips, giving it Belle Epoque proportions that Rodin might’ve recognized. Not so simple, in the end, but the absence of complication did reveal something new about Abe: She cuts a terrific pair of leg elongating pants.
3 October 2023
After 14 days straight of reporting the curated unreality of the menswear shows, you can be left a little delirious. Radical pants, rude wranglers (you know who you are), and strange encounters haunt your restless dreams. By day, so much weird stuff happens that it ceases to feel weird at all.Take this for example. Yesterday after Loewe, a knot of us were discussing menswear withSuccession’s Brian Cox—a proud Scot. Naturally, talk turned to that nation’s great contribution to the canon. Cox was unequivocal that when wearing a kilt, everything else under it should be au naturel. “Because what’s the point of the kilt if there’s no air circulation?” he growled with the assurance of Logan Roy knifing a child.Fast forward 24 hours and we were sitting outside at Sacai in the Sorbonne, as the mercury hit 91 degrees. Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack was as banging as we were sweating: seriously. Suddenly the beats receded to be replaced by unmistakeable dread strings (sans piano) from the credits ofSuccession. And as they played, out came a model wearing—because of course—a kilt.Like much in the opening section of this collection by Chitose Abe, it mixed pinstripe suiting wool and denim: white collar at the front, blue collar at the back. I was not going to ask Abe for her thoughts about freedom of movement under men’s kilts—a bit much. But there was a great deal of circulation in the air across the whole of her offer today.An inveterate hybridist, Abe returned to the fray with an agenda to express a “positive punk spirit”—one T-shirt read “Know Future”—in outfits that explored harmonic contradiction. In other words, while all the looks were matchy-matchy, within them she used ingenious design and fabrication to splice together elements whose adjacency was strictly “wrong.” Thus the denim and the pinstripe. Abe said her childhood determination to remix her school uniform just as far as she could within the boundaries of the rules had come back to her while developing these looks.Other examples saw Carhartt cotton duck cut into covert coats for men or double-breasted evening jackets for women, ombre Fair Isle knits expressed in what looked like tufted fleece, and stately decorative florals (as on the mega-swatches at Loewe) embroidered onto workwear bleus de travail, or printed onto silky sheer-paneled rugby shirts. Crepe sweatshirts were crafted into short and long hemmed dresses, and desert-toned MA-1 bombers sculpted into peplum skirts and sleeveless zip-ups.
More hybridized Carhartt/tailoring jackets were delicately accessorized with hanging pearlescent beads behind the collar. “They used to laugh at me, but I saw the future,” went the Lil’ Louis sample on Gaubert’s typically energizing soundtrack. And see the future we did—at least as far as spring 2024.
25 June 2023
After 14 days straight of reporting the curated unreality of the menswear shows, you can be left a little delirious. Radical pants, rude wranglers (you know who you are), and strange encounters haunt your restless dreams. By day, so much weird stuff happens that it ceases to feel weird at all.Take this for example. Yesterday after Loewe, a knot of us were discussing menswear withSuccession’s Brian Cox—a proud Scot. Naturally, talk turned to that nation’s great contribution to the canon. Cox was unequivocal that when wearing a kilt, everything else under it should be au naturel. “Because what’s the point of the kilt if there’s no air circulation?” he growled with the assurance of Logan Roy knifing a child.Fast forward 24 hours and we were sitting outside at Sacai in the Sorbonne, as the mercury hit 91 degrees. Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack was as banging as we were sweating: seriously. Suddenly the beats receded to be replaced by unmistakeable dread strings (sans piano) from the credits ofSuccession. And as they played, out came a model wearing—because of course—a kilt.Like much in the opening section of this collection by Chitose Abe, it mixed pinstripe suiting wool and denim: white collar at the front, blue collar at the back. I was not going to ask Abe for her thoughts about freedom of movement under men’s kilts—a bit much. But there was a great deal of circulation in the air across the whole of her offer today.An inveterate hybridist, Abe returned to the fray with an agenda to express a “positive punk spirit”—one T-shirt read “Know Future”—in outfits that explored harmonic contradiction. In other words, while all the looks were matchy-matchy, within them she used ingenious design and fabrication to splice together elements whose adjacency was strictly “wrong.” Thus the denim and the pinstripe. Abe said her childhood determination to remix her school uniform just as far as she could within the boundaries of the rules had come back to her while developing these looks.Other examples saw Carhartt cotton duck cut into covert coats for men or double-breasted evening jackets for women, ombre Fair Isle knits expressed in what looked like tufted fleece, and stately decorative florals (as on the mega-swatches at Loewe) embroidered onto workwear bleus de travail, or printed onto silky sheer-paneled rugby shirts. Crepe sweatshirts were crafted into short and long hemmed dresses, and desert-toned MA-1 bombers sculpted into peplum skirts and sleeveless zip-ups.
More hybridized Carhartt/tailoring jackets were delicately accessorized with hanging pearlescent beads behind the collar. “They used to laugh at me, but I saw the future,” went the Lil’ Louis sample on Gaubert’s typically energizing soundtrack. And see the future we did—at least as far as spring 2024.
25 June 2023
Since her return to the Paris runway after the pandemic lockdowns in Japan, Chitose Abe has been exploring a new formality. In the Before Times, colorful graphic prints and sport and/or utility motifs were reliably present in her collections. Post-Covid, she’s been using more black and white, and building her signature hybridized garments from dressier building blocks.If it’s counterintuitive—the thinking being that Covid accelerated the casualization of fashion—it’s served to widen her design vocabulary. For fall, she didn’t really do much hybridizing at all. Instead, she “dissected” quite traditionally made garments and shifted them either to the side or up. Long slit skirts, for example, were sewn with a shoulder strap and patch pocket. Sling the strap over a shoulder and not only does the shape of the skirt change, but now you’ve got a bag, too. Quite utilitarian in the end.Despite the non-stop talk about pantsuits, it’s been a banner season for skirts, and Abe had a range of options, including a fluted skirt saved from conformity by a number of vertical slashes (callbacks to theInterstellarreferences in her menswear, maybe) and more complex skirts that unwound around the legs, from the hips down to the anklesOn jackets, the slices Abe made were horizontal, which lifted the silhouette; rather than hitting at the hips, they were cropped above the waist. Basting stitches and trailing threads decorated a group of pieces at the end that included a dress coat version of those tiered jackets. The basting stitches are leftovers from the bonding process that holds two fabrics in place until they’re fused into one, and normally they’re removed from final garments. But Abe liked the look of them.Challenging preconceived notions in design has always been Abe’s “kachikan,” meaning her priority or her value. Her instincts this season may have led her to the idea of elegance, but the conventional isn’t something she’s interested in.
6 March 2023
The existential, 169-minute sci-fi movieInterstellaris a slow burn that eventually becomes enthralling: by the finale it’s borderline mind-altering. But boy, does it take time to get going. So it was kind of appropriate that thisInterstellar-inspired Sacai collection—one of Chitose Abe’s most fascinating menswear (plus pre) missions ever—also took way too long to take off. This was because a certain celebrity fashion tourist was late (again). The show was held for 45 minutes, and still he didn’t arrive. Disrespect. Why do show producers put up with this and steal everyone else’s time?At last, the collection was a go. The seasonal conceit ofInterstellarand the ongoing Sacai subjects of hybridization and transformation meshed finely. Conceit-wise, there seemed three main references to the movie; a Murph’s bookcase print and the morse code/anomaly print that featured Cooper’s porch line “it was never meant to die here” were both fun fan references. However it was the collaborative pieces produced with Carhartt, Cooper’s chore jacket supplier of choice, that really took you to another dimension. Following the European-license arm of the American workwear staple’s excellent daisy-age Marni collab, this was its second home run of the season. Look 32 was a straight up cameo for Cooper, albeit with the chore split with side-vents—a through-collection theme in outerwear—and with a protruding khaki underlayer. Extra dimensions were added to oversized “fleeces,” and some amazing MA1 bombers with skirts strapped up against the model’s shoulders—these could be loosened to create longer-form (even if we’d been here long enough) outerwear. They were so good.The inky blackness of space inflected a Catholically black series of looks whose severity contrasted with the disruption to come. The transformation was signaled by a moonrise of multi-color degradé layers in knits that gradually supplanted the blackness and signaled the experimentation ahead. Arguably that experimentation’s high point was the series of looks created with Moncler—an old co-creator with whom Sacai is reuniting for its 70th anniversary—that we saw close to the end. These meldedpiuminoouterwear with tailoring, accessories and skirts to create a sort of modular macro-universe of dress within each look: single pieces containing a myriad of disassemble-able elements. They came in pieces for all mankind.
22 January 2023
The existential, 169-minute sci-fi movieInterstellaris a slow burn that eventually becomes enthralling: by the finale it’s borderline mind-altering. But boy, does it take time to get going. So it was kind of appropriate that thisInterstellar-inspired Sacai collection—one of Chitose Abe’s most fascinating menswear (plus pre) missions ever—also took way too long to take off. This was because a certain celebrity fashion tourist was late (again). The show was held for 45 minutes, and still he didn’t arrive. Disrespect. Why do show producers put up with this and steal everyone else’s time?At last, the collection was a go. The seasonal conceit ofInterstellarand the ongoing Sacai subjects of hybridization and transformation meshed finely. Conceit-wise, there seemed three main references to the movie; a Murph’s bookcase print and the morse code/anomaly print that featured Cooper’s porch line “it was never meant to die here” were both fun fan references. However it was the collaborative pieces produced with Carhartt, Cooper’s chore jacket supplier of choice, that really took you to another dimension. Following the European-license arm of the American workwear staple’s excellent daisy-age Marni collab, this was its second home run of the season. Look 32 was a straight up cameo for Cooper, albeit with the chore split with side-vents—a through-collection theme in outerwear—and with a protruding khaki underlayer. Extra dimensions were added to oversized “fleeces,” and some amazing MA1 bombers with skirts strapped up against the model’s shoulders—these could be loosened to create longer-form (even if we’d been here long enough) outerwear. They were so good.The inky blackness of space inflected a Catholically black series of looks whose severity contrasted with the disruption to come. The transformation was signaled by a moonrise of multi-color degradé layers in knits that gradually supplanted the blackness and signaled the experimentation ahead. Arguably that experimentation’s high point was the series of looks created with Moncler—an old co-creator with whom Sacai is reuniting for its 70th anniversary—that we saw close to the end. These meldedpiuminoouterwear with tailoring, accessories and skirts to create a sort of modular macro-universe of dress within each look: single pieces containing a myriad of disassemble-able elements. They came in pieces for all mankind.
22 January 2023
The Sacai collection began with a hybridized tuxedo-shirt combination, the pleats of the black jacket and white button-down intermingling at their hems. It was worn with a kicky pair of fitted pleated pants, more like leggings than trousers, that opened into flares a few inches north of the ankles. As the model passed, the silhouette got a “wow, that’s great,” from a seatmate. No small feat on the penultimate day of fashion month.Pleats are the main event at Sacai this season. Designer Chitose Abe’s collection was in progress long before Issey Miyake, the groundbreaking Japanese designer known for his innovative pleats, died in early August. But there’s a connection nonetheless. Miyake’s pleats promised freedom of movement and, while they’re entirely different, so do Abe’s. “I really wanted to express a sense of freedom, and an attitude of positivity and joy,” she said after the show.Abe began her career as a pattern-maker, and it explains her very focused approach. Every category got the pleat treatment, from crisp black and white tailoring to an army surplus MA-1 jacket to soft leather tank dresses. The result was a collection of A-line shapes with the fluidity that she was after, even when it was reined in with a more structured element, like the asymmetric mini layered over a short shirt-dress.Also A-line: most of the sleeves. Abe split jacket arms down the seams and designed shirt sleeves to extend past the fingertips; the models wore them pushed up, which created pooling volumes around the wrists. The room was full of women in Sacai coats, which are distinctive without yielding any sense of practicality. This season’s entry into the canon was a smartly cut trench with exterior pockets attached to its belt and those dramatic split sleeves.
3 October 2022
There’s a fall 2014 Sacai leather Perfecto/hunting jacket hybrid in my closet that I pulled out several times this winter. I have other, newer jackets, including by Sacai; the fact that I keep going back to that one says a lot about what Chitose Abe does. There’s some special kind of magic in her mash-ups; they simply don’t age.Still, Abe is responsible for producing multiple collections a year, and reanimating her signatures when she does so. For her spring 2023 men’s and resort 2023 women’s lineups she came at that newness first via fabrication. She’s using Loro Piana Storm System wool for outerwear and tailored separates, and Thomas Mason cotton for shirting. Both are standard bearers for quality and timelessness, the very definition of “anti-trend,” though it’s true that anti-trend concept has become rather trendy post-pandemic.Of course, Abe is using those materials “in a Sacai way,” and that’s where the second element of freshness comes from. The shirts are patchworked from mismatched stripes, or cut with slits at the sides so they can be worn like capes. Meanwhile, on her tailoring for both women and men, pleats took center stage. The neat pleats give jackets, long skirts, and cropped pants an appealing fluidity and movement. It’s an ease that is anything but easy to achieve, Abe said. She likes a design challenge; she built her brand identity on them.She also likes collaborations and this season she came back around to a conspirator she worked with last year, the graffiti artist Eric Haze. For fall 2021, Haze “tagged” a Sacai t-shirt with the phrase “One Kind Word.” This time around, that phrase and the words “As One” were repeated mantra-like—knitted into chunky sweaters, woven as jacquards on pants, and printed bandana-style on breezy dresses. Timeless sentiments, but never more timely than now.
26 June 2022
There’s a fall 2014 Sacai leather Perfecto/hunting jacket hybrid in my closet that I pulled out several times this winter. I have other, newer jackets, including by Sacai; the fact that I keep going back to that one says a lot about what Chitose Abe does. There’s some special kind of magic in her mash-ups; they simply don’t age.Still, Abe is responsible for producing multiple collections a year, and reanimating her signatures when she does so. For her spring 2023 men’s and resort 2023 women’s lineups she came at that newness first via fabrication. She’s using Loro Piana Storm System wool for outerwear and tailored separates, and Thomas Mason cotton for shirting. Both are standard bearers for quality and timelessness, the very definition of “anti-trend,” though it’s true that anti-trend concept has become rather trendy post-pandemic.Of course, Abe is using those materials “in a Sacai way,” and that’s where the second element of freshness comes from. The shirts are patchworked from mismatched stripes, or cut with slits at the sides so they can be worn like capes. Meanwhile, on her tailoring for both women and men, pleats took center stage. The neat pleats give jackets, long skirts, and cropped pants an appealing fluidity and movement. It’s an ease that is anything but easy to achieve, Abe said. She likes a design challenge; she built her brand identity on them.She also likes collaborations and this season she came back around to a conspirator she worked with last year, the graffiti artist Eric Haze. For fall 2021, Haze “tagged” a Sacai t-shirt with the phrase “One Kind Word.” This time around, that phrase and the words “As One” were repeated mantra-like—knitted into chunky sweaters, woven as jacquards on pants, and printed bandana-style on breezy dresses. Timeless sentiments, but never more timely than now.
26 June 2022
Chitose Abe fought back tears backstage. It’s been two years that she hasn’t traveled to Paris to present her Sacai collection. Typically, she comes four times a year, twice for women’s and twice for men’s, but COVID has kept her in her Tokyo home base since the start of the pandemic.To mark her return, Abe said, “I really wanted to make clothing very impeccably.” The collection was recognizably Sacai, but it was pitched more toward special occasions in a sort of celebration of her return to the runway. The show opened with a long dress whose tank top and ball skirt shape had been stripped of formality while retaining a cool sort of grandeur. Model Julia Nobis’s Cartier Trinity ear cuff, part of a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the jeweler and a fashion designer, coming out later this year, contributed to the dressed-up mood.The Abe method is to create garments both novel and familiar by hybridizing different items together. In the past, a peacoat might come with a puffer back or a leather Perfecto would commingle with a tweed blazer. Pieces like those have become Sacai icons, easy to spot for those in the know. This time around, the idea was less about her signature mash-ups and more about experimenting with singular pieces. On boxy men’s jackets, Abe cut into the pattern to create bra shapes worn over the top of them, their elasticated straps gathering the back of jackets into extreme bustle shapes. The collection’s long skirts, meanwhile, were split up the center front and back, with each side gathered to the thighs. If that sounds complicated, it actually added a nice ease to an otherwise dramatic silhouette.That’s one of Abe’s talents, delivering a lot of look simply by tinkering with shape, where other designers resort to embellishment. Amidst the lean shapes elongated by raised waists that dominated the lineup was a standout parka whose khaki shoulders were spliced with a burst of three-dimensional red satin, as if a winter jacket had reproduced with a mid-century bubble dress. It was a real treat seeing Abe’s inventive work in real life again.
7 March 2022
Chitose Abe’s collaborator this season is Madsaki, the Japanese-born, New York– and Tokyo-based artist whose preferred medium is spray paint. The front of sweatshirts and the back of jackets in Abe’s new collection are tagged via printing techniques and embroideries with his provocation: “Sheeple Zombies and Kool-Aid.” Madsaki’s words seem related, at least tangentially, to what Abe talked about over Zoom from Tokyo.“I’m ready to take things to the next step, to dig deeper into the pure essence of Sacai, which is really about self-assurance and self-confidence,” she said. “If I have that self-assurance and self-confidence, the wearer will also.” Digging deeper for Abe meant looking back at her earliest Sacai collections, when exposed lingerie was one of her first brand tropes. Here, though, she built the lingerie directly into her tailoring. The front of jackets are seamed with bra cups, and the backs are gathered at the bra line, but these aren’t just decorative touches; the bra details give the jackets the distinctive peplumed shape that’s one of the hallmarks of Abe’s designs. She also teamed up with the leather specialists at Schott on moto jackets that echo the curving silhouettes of her tailoring. The men’s offering had prodigious volumes as well, only without the lingerie elements.Abe is ultra process-oriented, and her complex hybridizations produce unique results. Other designers follow her lead, but her drive seems entirely internal. She’s keen to return to the Paris runway for the women’s fall 2022 collections in a month’s time, Covid regulations permitting. This season, she conveyed her message via a video in which a crew of young people take turns joyriding on the roof of a DeLorean. The highway has been tagged by Madsaki too—no sheeple in Sacai’s circle.
23 January 2022
Chitose Abe’s collaborator this season is Madsaki, the Japanese-born, New York– and Tokyo-based artist whose preferred medium is spray paint. The front of sweatshirts and the back of jackets in Abe’s new collection are tagged via printing techniques and embroideries with his provocation: “Sheeple Zombies and Kool-Aid.” Madsaki’s words seem related, at least tangentially, to what Abe talked about over Zoom from Tokyo.“I’m ready to take things to the next step, to dig deeper into the pure essence of Sacai, which is really about self-assurance and self-confidence,” she said. “If I have that self-assurance and self-confidence, the wearer will also.” Digging deeper for Abe meant looking back at her earliest Sacai collections, when exposed lingerie was one of her first brand tropes. Here, though, she built the lingerie directly into her tailoring. The front of jackets are seamed with bra cups, and the backs are gathered at the bra line, but these aren’t just decorative touches; the bra details give the jackets the distinctive peplumed shape that’s one of the hallmarks of Abe’s designs. She also teamed up with the leather specialists at Schott on moto jackets that echo the curving silhouettes of her tailoring. The men’s offering had prodigious volumes as well, only without the lingerie elements.Abe is ultra process-oriented, and her complex hybridizations produce unique results. Other designers follow her lead, but her drive seems entirely internal. She’s keen to return to the Paris runway for the women’s fall 2022 collections in a month’s time, Covid regulations permitting. This season, she conveyed her message via a video in which a crew of young people take turns joyriding on the roof of a DeLorean. The highway has been tagged by Madsaki too—no sheeple in Sacai’s circle.
23 January 2022
Chitose Abe has brought ingenuity to her pattern-making since the beginning of her Tokyo-based brand Sacai, splicing garments into hybrids that have been co-opted as badges of cool across the market. If you see a blazer with bomber sleeves or a peacoat-slash-puffer on the runway these days, it’s because Abe did it first—years ago.For spring, she kicked up her experimentations a notch, designing many of the pieces in her new collection as two-in-ones. What that means is that the dress you see here can morph into a sharply cut sleeveless double-breasted short coat if you pull its hem up over the shoulders. Look 29 operates on the same principle, only that dress transforms into an MA1 jacket. Ditto the top and pants in Look 26: It’s actually a jumpsuit in army surplus with a built-in silk blouse.Abe has long loved the interplay of dualities: masculine and feminine, workwear and fancy dress. This season, she put that give-and-take approach in her customers’ own hands. Some pieces come with detachable puffed shoulders; on or off, they change the attitude of the garments in question.Many designers rallied around the concepts of versatility and adaptability this season, maybe because of the challenging times we find ourselves in. Abe is among them, but this was simultaneously one of her more sensuous collections of late, with mini lengths, unexpected bare backs on ribbed knit sweaters and tweed vests; and silk charmeuse and silk duchesse in equal measure to the hardier canvas and nylon. There were also oversize leopard spots and polka dots adding visual interest to the workwear palette. It takes finesse to balance utility on the one hand and seduction on the other, but seeing both sides of a situation is the Abe way.
20 October 2021
Chitose Abe is back home in Tokyo after her Paris haute couture debut. The prolific designer presented a one-off Jean Paul Gaultier collection, the first of that brand’s new partnership projects. She called it an “intimate, more friendly proposal” than the long-running collaboration she has with Nike or her recently announced hookup with Dior Men’s Kim Jones.Her latest Sacai collections for men and women feature yet another collab, this one with the cult German streetwear label ACRONYM, whose designer Errolson Hugh has been likened by my colleagues at GQ to “some sort of ninja-god-slash astronaut.” ACRONYM specializes in technical outerwear, often in monochrome. Errolson brought the waterproof nylon, Abe brought the bandana prints, buffalo plaids, and rug jacquards.One throughline of the recent collections has been a sort of elegant functionality; it’s a reaction, no doubt, to the pandemic-time ease—and exercising—we all got used to, and the collective desire to return to a more glamorous way of life. For Abe, the dueling urges yielded a series of camel separates made with an unlikely combination of satin and raincoat fabric. Elsewhere, she paired a cozy buffalo plaid sweater with a buffalo plaid chiffon maxi skirt, and cut a chesterfield coat in white chiffon appliqued in a bandana pattern.The men’s collection had a more expeditionary spirit, with an emphasis on jackets and vests that could do double duty on the street or at the campsite—an active lifestyle means different things to different people. Abe had the collections shot on the streets of Paris when she was in town for couture, where a well-timed rain shower helped her make her point about utility. Next up: a collab with the weather gods?
26 July 2021
Chitose Abe is back home in Tokyo after her Paris haute couture debut. The prolific designer presented a one-off Jean Paul Gaultier collection, the first of that brand’s new partnership projects. She called it an “intimate, more friendly proposal” than the long-running collaboration she has with Nike or her recently announced hookup with Dior Men’s Kim Jones.Her latest Sacai collections for men and women feature yet another collab, this one with the cult German streetwear label ACRONYM, whose designer Errolson Hugh has been likened by my colleagues at GQ to “some sort of ninja-god-slash astronaut.” ACRONYM specializes in technical outerwear, often in monochrome. Errolson brought the waterproof nylon, Abe brought the bandana prints, buffalo plaids, and rug jacquards.One throughline of the recent collections has been a sort of elegant functionality; it’s a reaction, no doubt, to the pandemic-time ease—and exercising—we all got used to, and the collective desire to return to a more glamorous way of life. For Abe, the dueling urges yielded a series of camel separates made with an unlikely combination of satin and raincoat fabric. Elsewhere, she paired a cozy buffalo plaid sweater with a buffalo plaid chiffon maxi skirt, and cut a chesterfield coat in white chiffon appliqued in a bandana pattern.The men’s collection had a more expeditionary spirit, with an emphasis on jackets and vests that could do double duty on the street or at the campsite—an active lifestyle means different things to different people. Abe had the collections shot on the streets of Paris when she was in town for couture, where a well-timed rain shower helped her make her point about utility. Next up: a collab with the weather gods?
26 July 2021
Chitose Abe is coming off of several pandemic-timed collections that put the emphasis on casual ease; Sacai-for-real-life is how I described it a couple of Zoom calls back. With her fall lineup, she was after a different effect. Abe is betting on a reemergence return to dressing up, one that will see her clients in elongated, close-to-the-body silhouettes that waft in soft volumes below the knees, often with a statement coat topping off the look. The results are willowy yet tough, a neat trick.The Sacai team recreated Tokyo’s frenetic Shibuya Crossing on a studio lot outside the city, and landed a helicopter in the middle of the intersection that in real life is too thronged with people for such a feat. In the video, models emerge from the helicopter’s side door, parade around it in a group, and watch from the crosswalk when it takes off again. Abe laughed and said she had to reassure her mother that she hadn’t actually bought it. The point was to drive home the urbane nature of the clothes.The hybridizations that define Abe’s Sacai designs continue to be co-opted by other labels, so she keeps on experimenting. This season she played with different size patterns in some cases, and in others mixed masculine and feminine tropes. Layering a smaller jacket over a larger one, as she did in the first exit, produced the puffed line of its shoulders and oversize sleeves. Meanwhile, the fluid look of the collection’s many long skirts was achieved by leaving the side seams of trousers unfinished so that the panels float around the legs below the tighter skirts worn over them.Are Abe’s clients ready to hang up their Sacai x Nike trainers? The last look could tempt even the ones most wedded to their home clothes. The fringed lamé dress slips over the head, and wears like a sweatshirt.
21 May 2021
In a fortuitous bit of timing, Chitose Abe’s fall men’s and women’s resort images have been released just days after the opening of a Brooklyn Museum exhibition of the work of her friend and new collaborator Kaws (aka Brian Donnelly). Had it been a normal year Abe would’ve put these clothes on the runway in Paris in mid-January. As it was, the collection was developed over Zoom, with Abe in Tokyo and Donnelly stateside. Now, with photos of his Kaws pieces in the papers and on our Instagram feeds, these Sacai collections feel particularly zeitgeisty.Donnelly’s cartoon colors and graffiti tag double x’s animate a parka, a top coat, and a particularly eye-catching knit cape. There’s also a Nike collaboration that unites the designer and the artist with the sportswear giant for a couple of pairs of what will no doubt be highly in-demand high tops.Her artist friend’s output is quite kinetic in its own right (even in a second neutral colorway) so Abe mostly saved the hybridizing for which she’s known for her collection’s other pieces. A trench was fused with a ribbed cardigan; a single-breasted jacket was spliced with a windbreaker color-blocked in Kaws hues in ripstop nylon; and a double-breasted jacket was grafted to a down puffer. If Abe’s methods are familiar by now, the results here didn’t fail to entice. Some dudes’ walls are lined with Kaws, other guys’ closets are full of Sacai. Their success comes down to their super-recognizable signatures.Abe has a collaboration of a different kind on the horizon: She’s the first guest designer at Jean Paul Gaultier Couture, a project that was to have its debut last July, but is now tentatively set for this July. Hopefully she can make it to Paris; it’d be her first time there in more than a year and she’s looking forward to it. Of collaborations, she says, “it’s always a learning experience.”
2 March 2021
In a fortuitous bit of timing, Chitose Abe’s fall men’s and women’s resort images have been released just days after the opening of a Brooklyn Museum exhibition of the work of her friend and new collaborator KAWS (aka Brian Donnelly). Had it been a normal year Abe would’ve put these clothes on the runway in Paris in mid-January. As it was, the collection was developed over Zoom, with Abe in Tokyo and Donnelly stateside. Now, with photos of his KAWS pieces in the papers and on our Instagram feeds, these Sacai collections feel particularly zeitgeisty.Donnelly’s cartoon colors and graffiti tag double x’s animate a parka, a top coat, and a particularly eye-catching knit cape. There’s also a Nike collab that unites the designer and the artist with the sportswear giant for a couple of pairs of what will no doubt be highly in-demand high tops.Her artist friend’s output is quite kinetic in its own right (even in a second neutral colorway) so Abe mostly saved the hybridizing for which she’s known for her collection’s other pieces. A trench was fused with a ribbed cardigan; a single-breasted jacket was spliced with a windbreaker color-blocked in KAWS hues in ripstop nylon; and a double-breasted jacket was grafted to a down puffer. If Abe’s methods are familiar by now, the results here didn’t fail to entice. Some dudes’ walls are lined with KAWS, other guys’ closets are full of Sacai. Their success comes down to their super-recognizable signatures.Abe has a collaboration of a different kind on the horizon: She’s the first guest designer at Jean Paul Gaultier Couture, a project that was to have its debut last July, but is now tentatively set for this July. Hopefully she can make it to Paris; it’d be her first time there in more than a year and she’s looking forward to it. Of collaborations, she says, “it’s always a learning experience.”
2 March 2021
The pandemic prevented Sacai’s Chitose Abe from presenting in Paris this season, but it didn’t stop her from doing a show. The Tokyo designer chose the Enoura Observatory of the Odawara Art Foundation as a venue. A two-hour drive from the city, the Foundation was created by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto with the aim, Abe’s press notes said, “of conveying the essence of Japanese culture to a wider audience, particularly the ancient tradition of living in harmony with nature, with a deep respect for the spirits of the natural realm.” As the show started, a steady rain began. It is typhoon season in Japan, and rain was a risk in the outdoor setting. Livestream watchers wondered if it was a special effect, but it was the real thing—and kismet considering Sugimoto’s mission for the Odawara.Abe’s own mission this season involved elaborating on her signature hybridization technique. If her pre-season collection emphasized the everyday ease of the Sacai aesthetic—the designer talked about how she wears her unique pieces with jeans or leggings—this show had an elevated sensibility. The striped dresses, for instance, weren’t print or knit, as stripes often are. Rather, they’re patchworked from thick strips of satin, or else spliced with transparent material that allowed lacy bits of lingerie to peek through. The collection balanced menswear tailoring with femme touches: bra tops were cut with suiting fabric, and military MA-1 nylon was shaped into voluptuous, womanly silhouettes. On a Zoom call, Abe wore a T-shirt with an Albert Watson photo of Sade on the front, which also came down the runway, and talked about the singer’s “feminine strength.” It’s not an oxymoron, for anyone who still requires clarification.
9 October 2020
One of the delights of a Sacai show is discovering which historical figure or fictional character or vaunted institution Chitose Abe chooses to quote. In January, it was Albert Einstein (“I believe in intuition”) and a year ago it was Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski (“the rug really tied the room together”); evenThe New York Timesgot the Sacai treatment several seasons back. The pandemic made Abe’s July trip from Tokyo to Paris to present her men’s spring and women’s resort collections an impossibility, but the lockdown didn’t prevent a new collaboration.This season, she partnered with the American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who gave Abe permission to use the phrase “Love Over Rules”; it features in his neon light installations and in a gothic font on Sacai’s new T-shirts and parkas. Thomas dedicated the San Francisco installation ofLove Over Rulesto his cousin, who died suddenly in 2000; apparently the words were lifted from his last voice message to the artist. Over Zoom, Abe explained that “even before the coronavirus situation, I believed in this idea. No matter your race, culture, or sexuality, love overrules.”Due to Japan’s COVID-19 lockdown, Abe worked on this collection from home. “It allowed me to think about the things I loved about past collections,” she said. This new one features many of her favorite archival fabrics mashed-up to create tank tops, pajama shirts, wrap skirts, and long, loose shirt dresses. The linings of the “Love Over Rules” jackets are lively patchworks of the different prints. Abe is one of the few designers with a distinctive enough point of view to make this sort of nostalgizing a viable formula.The lookbook has a “Sacai for real life” vibe; Abe wanted to portray how she actually wears her clothes: not in “full looks,” but rather with her Nike leggings or her APC jeans. That jibes nicely with our more circumscribed daily routines. Still, she’s hoping she’ll be back in Paris with her next collection. “Even if it’s just 10 minutes long, being able to create that experience and environment is really important to me,” she says. “I’m preparing so that I can if the opportunity arises.”
11 August 2020
One of the delights of a Sacai show is discovering which historical figure or fictional character or vaunted institution Chitose Abe chooses to quote. In January, it was Albert Einstein (“I believe in intuition”) and a year ago it was Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski (“the rug really tied the room together”); evenThe New York Timesgot the Sacai treatment several seasons back. The pandemic made Abe’s July trip from Tokyo to Paris to present her men’s spring and women’s resort collections an impossibility, but the lockdown didn’t prevent a new collaboration.This season, she partnered with the American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who gave Abe permission to use the phrase “Love Over Rules”; it features in his neon light installations and in a gothic font on Sacai’s new T-shirts and parkas. Thomas dedicated the San Francisco installation ofLove Over Rulesto his cousin, who died suddenly in 2000; apparently the words were lifted from his last voice message to the artist. Over Zoom, Abe explained that “even before the coronavirus situation, I believed in this idea. No matter your race, culture, or sexuality, love overrules.”Due to Japan’s COVID-19 lockdown, Abe worked on this collection from home. “It allowed me to think about the things I loved about past collections,” she said. This new one features many of her favorite archival fabrics mashed-up to create tank tops, pajama shirts, wrap skirts, and long, loose shirt dresses. The linings of the “Love Over Rules” jackets are lively patchworks of the different prints. Abe is one of the few designers with a distinctive enough point of view to make this sort of nostalgizing a viable formula.The lookbook has a “Sacai for real life” vibe; Abe wanted to portray how she actually wears her clothes: not in “full looks,” but rather with her Nike leggings or her APC jeans. That jibes nicely with our more circumscribed daily routines. Still, she’s hoping she’ll be back in Paris with her next collection. “Even if it’s just 10 minutes long, being able to create that experience and environment is really important to me,” she says. “I’m preparing so that I can if the opportunity arises.”
11 August 2020
Chitose Abe’s Sacai show began with a line fromGattaca; it was Uma Thurman breathily uttering, “I want to show you something.” A sci-fi dystopia is just the thing for the current moment, but a bad trip wasn’t what Abe had in store for us today. It felt like we were headed to Saturn’s colossal moon Titan on the first-class deck.Abe was working with silks and tech fabrics, materials with a detectable sheen, and her hybrid silhouettes had an undeniable formality: Tuxedos at the top and bottom of the show turned to reveal they were actually floor-length dresses, and couture-ish shapes were fused to knitwear. Some of the pearl and crystal necklaces, we learned backstage, were actually built-ins.She’s rarely adopted quite so dressy an attitude. Ultimately, though, this was just a byproduct of her larger mission. An interpreter explained that Abe was thinking about movement. “This time it was really about how the clothes flow when you’re walking. She wanted to call it 4D because movement equates to time.” Titan is just the first leg of the journey, then; this isInterstellarSacai.In fact the space prints she used for a long-sleeve midi-dress were made more fluid with the injection of pleats in the back, and on a spacesuit hybridized with a sheer frock, they were actually lifted from NASA photographs, four of them chosen from an offering of 6,000. The estate of Alexander Girard, the mid-century textile designer, was Abe’s other collaborator. She manipulated the letters and numbers that appear on his 2015 monograph, inserting the name Sacai. It appeared on the chest of a floaty dress right where an astronaut’s name would be printed. Girard was chosen, her interpreter said, “because Chitose associates him with positivity, and she always wants to be positive.” If Abe’s piloting, we’d happily make the trip.
2 March 2020
Chitose Abe doesn’t have a formula for arriving at all her desirable hybrids; it’s mainly intuition, she insisted after today’s show. It turns out that the man who invented what is arguably the world’s most famous and universal formula,E=mc², was also a big believer in intuition, so Abe made his words her latest motto. Sacai with a side of Einstein was a genius move.Backstage, she was wearing a T-shirt that read “common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18”—a quote commonly attributed to him. Abe is not, it should be said, a huge risk-taker. She allows an arbitrary inspiration to motivate a shift in layers and volumes or a shakeup in color or pattern; but you don’t get the sense she sets out to radically alter her repertoire. Instead, she experiments, innovates ,and taps into a topical subject or feeling.And this began with women’s looks consisting of suit jackets counterintuitively worn atop military layers that gave way to a fluid skirt and punk-ish platform boots. With a trace of Janet Jackson circaRhythm Nation, the statement was newly commanding and chic. The men’s variables included a few Mod-inflected ensembles, sweaters that unzipped up the torso, and total looks in lipstick pink that corresponded to the romantic spirit of the season. Across both collections, the usual toggling of utility and fluidity played out in animal spots and cosmic-themed bandana sketches by the tattoo artist Dr. Woo. Elsewhere, Abe relied on denim, tweed, tartan, and fleece, perhaps for no other reason than their familiarity.Necklaces assembled from signet rings, S caps that seemed to only be worn by the women, and a soundtrack with its spliced allusions to love (and a clever extract fromEinstein on the Beach) all entailed dozens of micro-intuitions that ultimately added up to a balanced equation. One imagines countless more went into the new Nike Vaporwaffle sneaker, which is even wackier and more tilted than the first design—such are the stakes today.Perhaps the answer could be found in the Einstein T-shirt, his tongue sticking out as though mocking us for taking photos of his photo on devices called “smartphones.” Below his portrait ran the quote “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.”
21 January 2020
Chitose Abe doesn’t have a formula for arriving at all her desirable hybrids; it’s mainly intuition, she insisted after today’s show. It turns out that the man who invented what is arguably the world’s most famous and universal formula,E=mc², was also a big believer in intuition, so Abe made his words her latest motto. Sacai with a side of Einstein was a genius move.Backstage, she was wearing a T-shirt that read “common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18”—a quote commonly attributed to him. Abe is not, it should be said, a huge risk-taker. She allows an arbitrary inspiration to motivate a shift in layers and volumes or a shakeup in color or pattern; but you don’t get the sense she sets out to radically alter her repertoire. Instead, she experiments, innovates ,and taps into a topical subject or feeling.And this began with women’s looks consisting of suit jackets counterintuitively worn atop military layers that gave way to a fluid skirt and punk-ish platform boots. With a trace of Janet Jackson circaRhythm Nation, the statement was newly commanding and chic. The men’s variables included a few Mod-inflected ensembles, sweaters that unzipped up the torso, and total looks in lipstick pink that corresponded to the romantic spirit of the season. Across both collections, the usual toggling of utility and fluidity played out in animal spots and cosmic-themed bandana sketches by the tattoo artist Dr. Woo. Elsewhere, Abe relied on denim, tweed, tartan, and fleece, perhaps for no other reason than their familiarity.Necklaces assembled from signet rings, S caps that seemed to only be worn by the women, and a soundtrack with its spliced allusions to love (and a clever extract fromEinstein on the Beach) all entailed dozens of micro-intuitions that ultimately added up to a balanced equation. One imagines countless more went into the new Nike Vaporwaffle sneaker, which is even wackier and more tilted than the first design—such are the stakes today.Perhaps the answer could be found in the Einstein T-shirt, his tongue sticking out as though mocking us for taking photos of his photo on devices called “smartphones.” Below his portrait ran the quote “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.”
18 January 2020
George Clinton, the Parliament Funkadelic founder and style icon, was front row at Chitose Abe’s Sacai show today in a bedazzled cap, jeans, trainers, Sacai T-shirt, and floor-length metallic jacket—dressed down by his standards. While developing her new Spring collection, Abe asked Clinton if she could use the cover of his 1978 album,One Nation Under a Groove. The 78-year-old legend said yes. Message tees have become as fundamental to Sacai shows as Abe’s famous hybrids. They illuminate her tastes—she reads theNew York Timesand likes Coen brothers movies, judging by her past projects. This season there was an especially pleasing synergy between her P-Funk partner and the collection. Abe was after a sense of harmony—there’s so little of it in the world at the moment. If anything can bring us together it’s Clinton’s famous tune, which played on the soundtrack as he bopped along shooting iPad videos.The Funkadelic record cover T-shirt was one way Abe communicated the sense of unity she wanted. Another was the map print she used for the series of opening and closing looks; the opening in color was more intense than the closing in black and white. These silhouettes had the asymmetry and lightness of scarf dressing; they’d make quite a statement while remaining easy to wear. Elaborating on the idea of harmony, many of the outfits that looked like three separate items—a shirt, pants, and trench, say—were actually jumpsuits. They were feats of patternmaking, but there was less hybridizing here than usual. Abe also experimented with geometric insets. They added new volume to jackets, and circling the leg they produced a flared ruffle hem at the ankle. At many other shows this season, stylists buckled or tied sandal straps on the outside of pants; this felt like part of the same eccentric hem story. Not that Abe’s looking left or right. All the scarf asymmetries and loose volumes conveyed another timely sentiment: freedom.
30 September 2019
For all the ideas that Chitose Abe brought to these men’s and women’s collections, nothing was as surprising as her shout-out toThe Big Lebowski. Sure, we have now come to expect fashion’s supreme remixer to place quotes within her collections, but “The rug really tied the room together” from the cult film felt especially out of left field—like some sort of creative non-sequitur. Could it be that Abe equates her signature hybridization to the rug? Not quite. Backstage, we learned that it was the “tying together” part that interested her—and that she did this with two “familiar” pieces rather than her usual clashed combos. Wardrobe archetypes—gray suit, a trench, a tuxedo, her standby MA1 jacket—all figured in this new exercise, which gave the impression of a more dressed-up lineup, even if each look registered the same swingy nonchalance as always.Two of the highlights came right at the start: the tuxedo shirt and pants fused into a roomy dress, undone bow tie included, followed by the reworkings of suit jackets and shirts. Some looks were tied together based on proportions; see the mini MA1 vest over an inside-out jacket or doubled-up denim jackets.Interestingly, the looks embellished with sequins gave off the same trace of grunge as some of the more obvious sun-struck flannels and mountaineering pants that were made in collaboration with Gramicci. Towards the end, men’s looks presented permutations of matching shirts and jackets in superpositions that would require buying both to achieve the same effect.Discovering how Abe will Sacai-fy an idea from one season to the next is part of the pleasure of attending her shows (the spliced-up music is often another). If it seems she’s itching to experiment, she’s also still doing so within her own familiar framework. In this space, where constructive criticism is always encouraged, perhaps the last word belongs to The Dude, whose quote appears on another T-shirt this season: “Yeah, well, that’s your own opinion, then.”
22 June 2019
For all the ideas that Chitose Abe brought to these men’s and women’s collections, nothing was as surprising as her shout-out toThe Big Lebowski. Sure, we have now come to expect fashion’s supreme remixer to place quotes within her collections; but “The rug really tied the room together” from the cult film felt especially left-field—like some sort of creative non-sequitur. Could it be that Abe equates her signature hybridization to the rug? Not quite. Backstage, we learned that it was the “tying together” part that interested her—and that she did this with two “familiar” pieces rather than her usual clashed combos. Wardrobe archetypes—gray suit, a trench, a tuxedo, her standby MA1 jacket—all figured in this new exercise, which gave the impression of a more dressed-up lineup, even if each look registered the same swingy nonchalance as always.Two of the highlights came right at the start: the tuxedo shirt and pants fused into a roomy dress, undone bowtie included, followed by the reworkings of suit jackets and shirts. Some looks were tied together based on proportions; see the mini MA1 vest over an inside-out jacket or else doubled-up denim jackets.Interestingly, the looks embellished with sequins gave off the same trace of grunge as some of the more obvious sun-struck flannels and mountaineering pants made in collaboration with Gramicci. Towards the end, men’s looks presented permutations of matching shirts and jackets in superpositions that would require buying both to achieve the same effect.Discovering how Abe will Sacai-fy an idea from one season to the next is part of the pleasure of attending her shows (the spliced-up music is often another). If it seems she’s itching to experiment, she’s also still doing so within her own familiar framework. In this space, where constructive criticism is always encouraged, perhaps the last word belongs to The Dude, whose quote appears on another T-shirt this season. “Yeah, well, that’s your own opinion, then.”
22 June 2019
Layering was at the root of Chitose Abe’s Sacai process this season. Of late, the designer’s signature hybridizations have been asymmetrical; her garments have been different from side to side, which is a whimsical but quite demanding proposition for the wearer. For Fall, Abe took up volume and proportion play. It made for her most winning and wearable collection in some time.Backstage, Abe said she started the work by thinking about the clothes she wore when she was young; she liked to layer Ralph Lauren’s kids’ button-downs over vintage dresses. On the runway today, that small-over-large idea translated into a double-breasted herringbone coat clasped by a cargo-shirt corset, or a generous khaki trench made snug through the chest by a shrunken surplus green vest. Rather ironically, the young-girl experiments resulted in quite couture-like silhouettes. Still, what will appeal about these pieces is their practicality. A shrunken cable-knit puffer-parka combination is grandly statement-making, but it won’t fail to keep you warm.It was a point Abe said she was eager to reinforce. Her print was based on the floor of the studio where Jackson Pollock made his famous drip paintings. “To most people, Sacai has an abstract philosophy,” she said through an interpreter. Hence Pollock, who was the most abstract of painters. “But when it’s put together, it’s more concrete and real.” There were also bandana-pattern embroideries and extrapolations on Fair Isle designs.Still, it was the outerwear that really connected. The marvel of Abe’s Sacai designs is, as particular as they are, that they don’t date. A Fall 2014 jacket, for example, looks as vital now as it did five years ago. That makes Sacai a clever investment. On that front, she debuted an earring collaboration with Paris jeweler Charlotte Chesnais and a new sunglasses range with the Tokyo-based eyewear company Native Sons.
4 March 2019
“Have you ever been to a fashion show like this?” The cheerful black humor of the wonderful French gentleman who has been driving team Vogue Runway around Paris was surpassing this morning as we were on the way to the Sacai show. At 8:30 a.m., he had just negotiated his way through a police roadblock at the entrance to the Place de la Concorde. I say police—you have to imagine a helmeted riot patrol of 10 men clad in black high-tech plated armor, like something out ofTron. As we bowled alone across the grand sweep of the cobblestones, there was a tank silhouetted against the entrance of the Tuileries gardens.It’s the closest I’ve ever got to feeling like Lee Miller reporting forVogue—I wouldn’t want to get any closer. But here we are, in Paris, where fashion goes on regardless in the days of thegilet jaunesaction, just as it did in WWII. And here is Kaia Gerber, kicking off the 10th Saturday of anti-Macron protests in a full-length semitransparent white nylon dress, trimmed with lace.Chitose Abe was showing her women’s Pre-Fall with her Fall men’s collection. She described it as “a stew, a melting pot of Sacai tastes.” Somewhere in it were a couple of boys in a black T-shirt and a hoodie printed with the logo of Bar Italia—a collaboration with the London hangout institution where “all kinds of people mix together.” Abe has fond memories of going to the Soho spot when she was a student, she said.People’s unity across cultures—that chimed a sweet note in this age of divisiveness. Clothes-wise, it was also a coming-together of sporty and formal, utilitarian down jackets, chunky knitting, and this time, a leopard-spot and faux fur injection of the season’s feeling for glamour.Fashion can credit Sacai with the fact that layerings and collagings of fabrics and genres of clothing have become almost normalized. In a way, it’s a physical reflection of our current state of consciousness—processing so many levels of things going on around us, and in our heads. Others may use that chopped-up awareness to amplify angst, but Sacai has succeeded in processing it into a steady lifestyle brand. That’s her success.
19 January 2019
“Have you ever been to a fashion show like this?” The cheerful black humor of the wonderful French gentleman who has been driving team Vogue Runway around Paris was surpassing this morning as we were on the way to the Sacai show. At 8:30 a.m., he had just negotiated his way through a police roadblock at the entrance to the Place de la Concorde. I say police—you have to imagine a helmeted riot patrol of 10 men clad in black high-tech plated armor, like something out ofTron. As we bowled alone across the grand sweep of the cobblestones, there was a tank silhouetted against the entrance of the Tuileries gardens.It’s the closest I’ve ever got to feeling like Lee Miller reporting forVogue—I wouldn’t want to get any closer. But here we are, in Paris, where fashion goes on regardless in the days of thegilet jaunesaction, just as it did in WWII. And here is Kaia Gerber, kicking off the 10th Saturday of anti-Macron protests in a full-length semitransparent white nylon dress, trimmed with lace.Chitose Abe was showing her women’s Pre-Fall with her Fall men’s collection. She described it as “a stew, a melting pot of Sacai tastes.” Somewhere in it were a couple of boys in a black T-shirt and a hoodie printed with the logo of Bar Italia—a collaboration with the London hangout institution where “all kinds of people mix together.” Abe has fond memories of going to the Soho spot when she was a student, she said.People’s unity across cultures—that chimed a sweet note in this age of divisiveness. Clothes-wise, it was also a coming-together of sporty and formal, utilitarian down jackets, chunky knitting, and this time, a leopard-spot and faux fur injection of the season’s feeling for glamour.Fashion can credit Sacai with the fact that layerings and collagings of fabrics and genres of clothing have become almost normalized. In a way, it’s a physical reflection of our current state of consciousness—processing so many levels of things going on around us, and in our heads. Others may use that chopped-up awareness to amplify angst, but Sacai has succeeded in processing it into a steady lifestyle brand. That’s her success.
19 January 2019
To scroll back through previous Sacai collections is to see how thoroughly designer Chitose Abe’s ideas have influenced other fashion creatives, and how her hybridization concept has infiltrated every price point of the market. To evolve while remaining true to her design signature, which she’s absolutely committed to doing, Abe has to push her hybrids in new directions.For Spring she opted to go asymmetrical. Rianne Van Rompaey’s show-opening look was ostensibly a white tuxedo with black revers, but filtered through Abe’s magic prism, it ended up quite different indeed. On top was a vest/cape hybrid split down the middle, and on the bottom were shorts with a partial over-skirt apron. The result was off-kilter in a way that’s likely to charm the Sacai acolytes and perplex the neophytes. A side-to-side hybrid is more disorienting to the eye than the back-to-fronts that Abe first gained fame for, but that’s the job of a designer: to challenge the eye and drive fashion forward.Abe’s asymmetrical idea was variously reproduced down the line in other fabrications. The faded denim and trench khaki combinations were winning—laid-back in spirit, they’ll be easily broken down into separates that a woman could get a lot of mileage out of. To follow, Abe cycled through military references, madras plaids, a brief ode to color-blocked rugbies and polos (really terrific), and finally abstract florals. The show got progressively bolder as it went on, and here and there the hybridization process Abe is so committed to complicated the final product. “It’s made in a complex way, but it’s easy to wear,” she’s fond of saying. What if it still looks complex, though? Abe’s got her formula and she’s done brilliantly by it, but it might be time to consider shaking it up.
1 October 2018
This was a good word to come across in the Sacai show notes:Free-form. It denoted something both about the outdoorsy, indie spirit of the Spring men’s and women’s Resort clothes, about the way they’re physically put together, and the mentality of the owner-designer herself. “I’ve learned that when I stop worrying about what will sell, and just go with doing things I feel like making, the better the sales reaction,” Chitose Abe said in a preview. “And I think this is the advantage of being independent.”There’s a generational desire for liberation running through fashion conversations at the moment, and Sacai’s neo-hippy traveller people seemed in sync with that vibe. She collaborated with Pendleton for blanket prints which set the tone, put headbands on the models, stuck feathers in their hair, and we were off.Video would do these clothes better justice than static runway shots. Abe’s design is what you might call ambient. All her panels and asymmetries come alive in movement, where you get to observe her use of blanket wraps—a bit tufted, and rough—and how she’s patched them in with parts of technical performance jackets, fragments of knits, denim, and so on. As always. Abe said her self-challenge this time was to stop short of creating perfection, and leave things a little undone. You glimpsed wavy zips, raw edges, and picked up a sense of spontaneity.Of course, it takes craft, experience, and precision to be able to construct these collages—and Sacai’s rapidly expanding business is no accident.
23 June 2018
This was a good word to come across in the Sacai show notes:Free-form. It denoted something both about the outdoorsy, indie spirit of the Spring men’s and women’s Resort clothes, about the way they’re physically put together, and the mentality of the owner-designer herself. “I’ve learned that when I stop worrying about what will sell, and just go with doing things I feel like making, the better the sales reaction,” Chitose Abe said in a preview. “And I think this is the advantage of being independent.”There’s a generational desire for liberation running through fashion conversations at the moment, and Sacai’s neo-hippy traveller people seemed in sync with that vibe. She collaborated with Pendleton for blanket prints which set the tone, put headbands on the models, stuck feathers in their hair, and we were off.Video would do these clothes better justice than static runway shots. Abe’s design is what you might call ambient. All her panels and asymmetries come alive in movement, where you get to observe her use of blanket wraps—a bit tufted, and rough—and how she’s patched them in with parts of technical performance jackets, fragments of knits, denim, and so on. As always. Abe said her self-challenge this time was to stop short of creating perfection, and leave things a little undone. You glimpsed wavy zips, raw edges, and picked up a sense of spontaneity.Of course, it takes craft, experience, and precision to be able to construct these collages—and Sacai’s rapidly expanding business is no accident.
23 June 2018
In this season, when so many designers have been fusing, hybridizing, and patchworking garments together—Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga and John Galliano at Maison Margiela, for two—let’s take a moment to applaud the woman who started it all. That Chitose Abe has brought about this change in the weather—a new normal in the language of fashion—is a success story which is reflected in the size of her Sacai business. What she started when she took up a pair of knitting needles in her apartment in Tokyo 20 years ago (as a mother at home with her baby daughter) has grown into a phenomenon which now sells men’s as well as womenswear throughout the world.Her skill—apart from the ability to make one outfit out of parts of many garments—is knowing the right archetypes to call on at any given time. This Fall, as classics have become a subject du jour, she was yet again on point, polishing up her assemblages with menswear tweeds, trad rainwear, school-blazer stripes, banker-stripe shirting, navy blazers, and generic down jackets. The general effect was half-and-half, this time arranged on a vertical axis rather than back-to-front (a point humorously underscored by the unmatched footwear). This was a strong, graphic collection which will surely fly.
5 March 2018
Why would a Japanse designer in Tokyo wish to collaborate with a Hawaiian shirt brand in Honolulu? Think about it a moment, and you realize that the citizens of both places are enduring the nuclear tension between North Korea and the United States. Chitose Abe is not a politicial or statement-making designer by any stretch of the imagination. Her quite terrific collection - men’s for Fall ‘18 and women’s Pre Fall shown together - was colourful and gutsy, seemingly less caught up in demonstrating the tricks of her trade than in making whole looks. Ultimately, though, she used her moment with the press to speak up for cross-cultural harmony, and you sensed why she was making a point of it now. Abe also put a T-shirt and fleece hoodie on the runway printed with the New York Times’ “Truth...” slogan.The opening group of a padded jacket and matching leggings, a couple of sweaters and an amazing heavily fringed poncho was in vivid red, green and purple - colors that really shouldn’t be allowed together, but really did work. But what was the print? Most of us misread it as a bandanna pattern, but Abe corrected that: it was a collaboration with the Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt company. Amongst Abe’s zippy, patchwork-y re-renderings of MA-1 jackets (a clever, side-zipped kilt stood out), trad English menswear checks, Aran and Norwegian knits, chunky blankets and shearling, there were several beautiful, languid dresses constructed from bands of velvet and pleated chiffon. In fact, this all-gender show gelled so well that it begged the question of what it benefits Sacai to show a whole new womenswear collection in little over a month? She should really think about continuing to show both men’s and women’s together.
20 January 2018
Why would a Japanese designer in Tokyo wish to collaborate with a Hawaiian shirt brand in Honolulu? Think about it a moment, and you realize that the citizens of both places are enduring the nuclear tension between North Korea and the United States. Chitose Abe is not a political or statement-making designer by any stretch of the imagination. Her quite terrific collection—men’s for Fall ’18 and women’s Pre-Fall shown together—was colorful and gutsy, seemingly less caught up in demonstrating the tricks of her trade than in making whole looks. Ultimately, though, she used her moment with the press to speak up for cross-cultural harmony, and you sensed why she was making a point of it now. Abe also put a T-shirt and fleece hoodie on the runway printed with theNew York Times’s “Truth . . .” slogan.The opening group of a padded jacket and matching leggings, a couple of sweaters, and an amazing heavily fringed poncho was in vivid red, green, and purple—colors that really shouldn’t be allowed together, but really did work. But what was the print? Most of us misread it as a bandanna pattern, but Abe corrected that: It was a collaboration with the Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt company. Among Abe’s zippy, patchwork re-renderings of MA-1 jackets (a clever, side-zipped kilt stood out), trad English menswear checks, Aran and Norwegian knits, chunky blankets, and shearling, there were several beautiful, languid dresses constructed from bands of velvet and pleated chiffon. In fact, this all-gender show gelled so well that it begged the question of what it benefits Sacai to show a whole new womenswear collection in little over a month? She should really think about continuing to show both men’s and women’s together.
20 January 2018
For her bow, Chitose Abe wore a graphic tee that announced, “Beware (It’s) Everywhere.” In black with white writing, it was the inverse of the one worn by Binx Walton in the show. There must be a message in the mirror image T-shirts, but what was it? Backstage, Abe put it this way: “You don’t have to go far to be inspired.” Inspiration is everywhere. Hybrids are Abe’s signature. Typically, her clever patternmaking has combined army parkas with puffers, or tweed blazers with biker jackets. There was visual wit, but not necessarily any added versatility. For Spring, she baked in the ingenuity, creating a wide array of two-for-the-price-of-one pieces. On the runway, the looks were shown with the jackets shrugged off the shoulders and suspended from utility straps, and with the sleeves tied at, or right below, the bust line. But they could also be worn with the sleeves pulled on and the lapels proper and correct. It’s a testament to the potency of Abe’s ideas that they’re percolating elsewhere. One of the recurring motifs at Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga show yesterday was the doubled coat, in which a trench, say, would be attached at the shoulders to a denim vest; there, too, the pieces could be worn two ways. Similarly, every look in Jun Takahashi’s Undercover show was reversible. Later this month in Tokyo, in fact, Abe and Takahashi will recreate the fashion-legendary time in 1991 that Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto put on a joint (men’s) show. Fun fact: Both Dennis Hopper and John Cale walked in it. Abe is a dexterous patternmaker to be sure, but she’s also a confident print mixologist. The other thing this show had going for it was the way her clashing plaids and lyrical flowers created a (headlines-defying) sense of uplift.
2 October 2017
Maybe there was a gentle point about cohesion and equality underlying the Sacai show. Fabric and color combinations were shared between the sexes as they went out in groupings. “One should live the way one wants!” Chitose Abe stated, through an interpreter, in a backstage press briefing after showing her Sacai menswear and women’s pre-Spring collections in Paris.She had, she said, been thinking about breaking down socially-prescribed uniforms, a continuation of her career-long interest in hybridization. She pointed to the cornflower blue outfit of shorts, anorak, and a fringed Western jacket as an example. “It’s a new three-piece suit. Why not?” Alongside the guy wearing this look was a girl wearing the women’s alternative in the same color—a minidress with a cross-laced front and a big fringed jacket with voluminous stiffened, quilted cuffs.Abe keyed into the logo trend by using work by the text artist Lawrence Weiner, “Stasis as to Vector All in Due Course,” as an allover diagonal print. It would be pointless to waste energy trying to decipher a meaning in that obscure assemblage of lettering. Sacai’s customers don’t come looking for messages, but to source pleasant, modern things to wear. It’s become a lifestyle brand which fills a niche between street and designer fashion. Abe’s subtle methods of upgrading generic bomber jackets, sweatshirts, parkas, and shirts by treating them to ingenious fabrications are much appreciated. This season, there were interesting departures into padded parachute silk and cross-stitch embroidery on striped banker-shirting for men, and a few outstanding, feminine dresses, like one in silver sequins and another in fan-pleasing dark green pleated chiffon.
24 June 2017
Sacai-ifyverb (used with object)to combine two or more different garments into one by hybridizing.to make (something familiar, normal, everyday) unfamiliar, unusual, extraordinary.to render null and void distinctions between day and night, work and play, high and low.By now, Chitose Abe’s methods at Sacai are well-known to us, but they still have the power to delight and surprise. For Fall, she added denim to her repertoire (a first). As you might have guessed, it’s not your standard five-pocket fare. Abe cut a jean jacket lined with fur and twisted denim into a long, swirling skirt spliced with silk or lace. Backstage, her interpreter said, “The idea is not to be confined to conventions.” So, among the others she tweaked were utility parkas, which came not in sturdy nylon, but in delicate multicolor floral lace. Flipping the script, she gave Chanel-ish tweed jackets an outdoorsy spin by morphing them into sporty anoraks and puffers. Still another way she reset normal was to layer colorful nylon jackets under a dress coat or cape. Casual? Formal? Abe’s work has been essential to breaking down those distinctions—they don’t mean much these days. In any case, the big takeaway from this show was its wide variety of statement coats.Aside from major outerwear, the new collection’s other dominant trope was the zipper. Coats breezed by unzipped all the way up the back and micro zips horizontally lined a plissé skirt, adding a floaty volume to the silhouette. Pants were also subject to multiple zippers. On the runway, they exposed flashes of skin; in real life, they’re more than likely to remain closed. That goes back to Abe’s philosophy, as elucidated after the show: “It’s what she wants to do, when she wants to, how she wants to do it.” No rules, no problem.
6 March 2017
As Chitose Abe was explaining her Pre-Fall collection through a translator, she repeatedly used “cut up” in English. For her, the two words seemed more accurate than any Japanese equivalent. Rather than the binary front/back hybrids that have defined Sacai from the start, this application of her collaging appears more integrated. Zoom in on any of the printed dresses and you can see two different fabrics continuously pieced together. To achieve this, she took apart two completed dresses. “It’s really cut up,” she insisted. “If I didn’t do that, it wouldn’t take the same shape.” While no one would ever describe Sacai as one-note, this adds a new level of technique to the brand’s design vocabulary. And in a sense, it speaks more softly—except, of course, for the T-shirt boasting the words on both front and back in various typographies.Yet Abe has also dialed down the volume of her usual fare, both literally and figuratively. Most of the coats—whether a parka style faux fur and shearling, or military-inspired with a flounced lace collar—are tailored closer to the body; and turtleneck knit tops or dresses interrupted by accordion pleated panels no longer appear as A-line silhouettes. Elsewhere, skirts showed pretty novelty, either as paisley flocked chiffon or a fringed sweater inserted with the familiar geometric lace. If this was the kind of pre-collection that measured as restrained relative to its runway counterparts, it also felt ready to wear in the truest sense, right down to the patterned socks. “I really want to teach the studio about beauty in other ways than what they know. We want to wear beautiful clothes but we don’t want to be conventionally beautiful,” she said, as though describing Look 32 with its desirable duality of grunge and homebody.Meanwhile, make note now of Abe’s collaboration with The North Face, which drops in the fall. (See Looks 9, 24, and 25 in the men’s runway show for a preview.) This definitely qualifies as a fresh hybrid.
22 January 2017
Chitose Abe was pointing out the finer points of her signature hybridization techniques backstage at her men’s show—she called it Cut Ups. As an indication, there had been a soundtrack recording of William S. Burroughs’s instructional account of how he used collages of chopped-up text and tape as a Dadaist literary method of producing random statements, which, he said, nevertheless often seemed to make predestined sense. It’s hard to imagine an assembler as practiced as Abe giving herself over to accident, though. This season her various arrangements of fabric, color, and garment archetypes of streetwear had a calmly organized vibe, and an almost serendipitous prettiness about them.The difference Abe spoke about, through her interpreter, was that she’d changed her habit of making pieces from contrasting fronts and backs. Now it was more a question of, say, marrying an English herringbone tweed coat with the hood of a mountaineering jacket, fixing a shearling flying-jacket collar on a khaki cotton raincoat, or embroidering the collar of a denim workwear jacket.Calming it down a bit worked well—Sacai is established enough now for Abe not to have to keep proving that she is fashion’s original collager in chief. The salt-and-pepper tweed parkas, velvet puffer jackets, and the mellow color palette (with its dusty pinks and soft yellows) gave it all a gentle, easy, utilitarianism, which chimed with the way things are going.
21 January 2017
Chitose Abe’s new collection is a tribute to “game changers,” dudes like Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Cobain, and the English tailor Tommy Nutter, among other assorted icons of cool. The idea, the designer said at a preview, was “to take things from their style and to put them all together, as one.” ToSacai-ify them, if you will.Abe is a game changer herself—first, in the way she manipulates multiple aspects of different garments, synthesizing them into something original, and, second, in the way her ideas have become so influential. You see her signature hybrids at so many labels now. How did she make the concept new this time around? Seizing on multiple points of reference was a clever way to give this collection depth and variety. You can Sacai a lot, with a white bandleader jacket à la Hendrix boasting heavy-duty frogging and a patchworked, multihued scarf-print dress, or you can Sacai a little, with, say, a navy sweater and pajama pants. Was the starting point there Serge Gainsbourg? Jane Birkin? It doesn’t matter; it looked cool.Riffing on the styles of the famous, she worked her way through many of her own hallmarks, from deconstructed marinières to lacy army surplus. One statement tee flipped a Joe Strummer quote, “Passion is a fashion,” so it readFashion is a passion.Abe is passionate, and she certainly knows her stuff. The Daniel Johnston T-shirts were based on one that Cobain wore to the MTV Video Music Awards circa 1992.The big story today was Abe’s bag launch, a long time coming, judging by what she said were the steady requests she’s had from retailers. Like her clothes, the bags are hybrids. A ladylike top-handle bag converts to a tote with a flip of the flap; other styles come with multiple removable straps—use one and hang it from the crook of your elbow; three, and you can sling it off your shoulder. Conveniently for Abe-ists, Colette has a fresh delivery of the bags in its window as of this morning.
3 October 2016
Normally Chitose Abe comes to Paris only for her women’s runway collections, so it was a treat to find her in a temporary showroom today, hours after her men’s show and shortly before her return to Tokyo. It’s not that she shared any revelatory backstory to herSacaiResort collection, which pretty much hewed to her signature mastery of opposites attract. Her presence simply helped form a closer association between character and craft. Abe had every reason to be proud of her homage to a crochet quilt; its colorful patchwork arrangement had been printed atop lace so that, from a distance, the openwork could have been either. As a poncho broken up by denim, the treatment was unpretentious and ingenious. In a similar vein, only upon close inspection might you discover hibiscus flowers embedded within a grid of lace. The collection was ripe with other randomness: trimmings borrowed from Afghan embroidery, smocked dresses in denim paisley jacquard punctuated with pineapples, and woven Mexican blankets turned into a parka. Abe blithely chalked up this mélange to the freedom that comes with designing in modern times.She reiterated that new ideas frequently materialize from what she would want to wear; as in, why settle for a classic tweed suit when you could transform it into a sporty minidress lined with a tuft of lace, or piece together a funky kilt? Women won’t need much persuading here. Abe duly drew attention to a hickory stripe jacket, pointing out that the material was uncut velvet—an uncommon material disguised as common workwear. But it’s also worth pointing out that, for all the whimsy, Abe filled the collection with utilitarian outerwear. Whether we need these types of high-flourish protection pieces or not, a certain pleasure arises from knowing they exist.
25 June 2016
This was Chitose Abe’s first everSacaimen’s runway show. That’s patently untrue in the wider scheme of things, but true in that it’s the first Abe has attended in person, to acknowledge the applause at the end. At a time when other designers are bowing out of doing menswear shows, it was interesting to see such a vehement commitment, both in terms of the designer’s presence on the runway and in her obvious involvement in the design studio. Abe’s clothes are by no means simple—they’re worked, complicated, and thought out. Often, when watching the show, it can take a minute or two to figure out exactly how it all works—where the pockets sit, where the buttonholes are, if that’s a sweater, or a shirt, or kind of both? That’s the conundrum of Sacai’s trademark hybrid garments.You’d never figure the quiet, cerebral Abe to be a fan of a bit of the old ultra-violence, though. Stanley Kubrick’sA Clockwork Orangewas a point of reference for her Spring 2017 collection, with low-pulled bowler-style hats, Nadsat terms like “oddy-knocky” and “horrowshow” [sic] printed across T-shirts. One look—dead-white bomber and skinny pants above heavy bovver boots—eerily channeled Kubrickian scenes. Those undertones gave a different context to the utilitarian bent of this outing. And, as opposed to the complexity of the dystopian linguistic gymnastics that characterized Anthony Burgess’s original novel, these clothes were relatively simple. Abe rinsed out some of the extraneous design tricksiness inherent in her sartorial crossbreeds, so a jacket did single-duty as just that. The collection was still broad and the looks multilayered, but it was easier to imagine yanking everything apart into individual pieces.Hanging onto theClockwork Orangereferences, it was interesting how Abe made the familiar feel alien, just as Burgess did with language. The references were standard military gear and the then–forward thinking sportswear of the ’90s, which now feels a little retro, crossbred with textiles pillaged from across the world—paisleys, American lumber checks, Afghan belt detailing, Aloha flowers, and the thick woven stripes of Central and South American gauchos. Abe’s droogs get about. But in the end, you ditched the theme: Get out of your Gulliver, put the book down, buy a jacket that’s just a jacket. Good clothes, done well. Nothing more complicated than that needed.
25 June 2016
When she took her bow this morning, Chitose Abe wore a shirt that read, in script,Love Will Save the Day. Backstage, one clever journalist pointed out it was a Whitney Houston song. Not one of her best, someone else quipped. Even in Japanese artist Mikitype’s gothic calligraphy, the phrase is pablum, if not quite as meaningless as some of the other sayings and slogans that have been proliferating on runways this season, in another trickle-up trend from the super-influential streetwear world. The difference atSacaiwas how Abe manipulated the saying in a million different ways. It was stitched on the front of a leather bomber, the words split in half by its industrial zip, but in more cases than not, the words were unrecognizable. Broken down into single letters, they appeared as graphic intarsias on knit sweaters; prints on pleated chiffon skirts; and scrolling embroideries on sheer, shimmery sweatshirts. Only with a zoomed-in study of these pictures did it become clear that the black and orange strips of lace inserted into navy separates spelled it out once more. The show, which culminated in special pieces stitched all over with badges, made the designers who’ve simply slapped words onto T-shirts and sweats look like they took the easy way out.Here, you didn’t have to agree with the sentiment, or even know where it came from—Abe said it was an instinctual response to the dark times we’re living in—to appreciate the clever workmanship. The clever styling, on the other hand, proved problematic. Abe has long been known for her hybridized garments. She’s smartly moving away from them; all designers have to evolve. But she’s still fond of volume play, so in their place she experimented with strapping. Arms, torsos, and even thighs were cinched with webbed belts, the ends dangling toward the ground and flying in the runway breeze. Sacai’s hybrids solved problems—it’s a sweater and a dress!—but the straps seemed like they could cause them. Beware of revolving doors. It will be interesting to see how women adapt this Sacai collection without the straps for real life next season.
7 March 2016
Chitose Abe and her team—notably her right-hand man, Daisuke Gemma—were thinking about love and life for Fall. The words, they said, are quite similar in Japanese; and given the turbulence of the world right now, they figured most people’s lives could do with more love.We’d all agree with that. What’s more difficult is to convince people they need more clothes. However, Sacai—a label founded back in the ’90s that has slow-burned and only leapt to prominence in the past few years—has proved more persuasive than most. That is possibly down to the weird mixing and mashing-up of different garments, fabrics, and treatments that wind up creating hybrid clothes that we’ve never seen before. Only, we’ve seen references to Sacai’s cut-and-paste approach all over the Fall season, jackets folding into sweaters, dropping trains, sprouting a double layer. Trace it back to here.Given their wares’ popularity as sly mood board reference points for others, Sacai understandably didn’t change direction with this show, but they did crank their menswear offering up a notch. It was Gemma who explained this backstage, rather than Abe—she was back in Japan working on the Fall womenswear line due to be presented in just over a month. But Gemma is embedded in Sacai and proved an able mouthpiece: “This is life with extra love,” he said, “extra processes, treatments, there’s love on each piece.” That “love” included garment-dyed shoes, jackets flipped inside out and intricately worked, knitting, and quilting. References ran the gamut: A single band of fabric spanning the hips was a reference to punk bum flaps and the traditional cummerbund. Elsewhere, there were Americana echoes, in bikers and sweatshirts, bandana prints blown up big, and collegiate stripes in feather-soft sheepskin. A decorative glut, crushed into single outfits. “But we’re from Tokyo,” Gemma shrugged. “So we like to mix things up.”The love theme was deftly handled: There were no hearts, for a start. The notion was abstractly expressed, through velvet linings cuddling softly against the body, and a surfeit of strapped-on life vests—“because life is worth saving,” mused Gemma, cod-philosophically. These are nice ideas to embed in clothes, and Sacai’s garments never feel like empty, soulless offerings or mere assemblages of textile. There’s a warmth and soul to them, a sense of humanity, which perhaps emanates from all their design foibles, their willful, overt complexity.
There’s a sense of the hand behind them, always. It can occasionally seem forced—as if a jacket has been sewn onto another jacket for the sheer sake of it, to prove some kind of technical prowess, rather than to serve a practical purpose, or actually make the garment more attractive.The zoetrope of themes spinning around in each outfit here threatened to prove dizzying, but it never became overwhelming. It was easy to pull apart these complicated, convoluted clothes and get them onto your back—quite literally, in the case of a knotted-up, bicolored duffle in oxblood wool and biscuit shearling. That was just two duffles misbuttoned together, sold separately. Sacai’s clothes are smart but simple. Life will love them.
23 January 2016
The danger in the kind of success thatSacai’sChitose Abe enjoys is that her clothes begin to look familiar. We see them everywhere now: in the front row, in street style pictures, and, it follows, in the knockoff stores. What to do? The Japanese designer hasn’t rewritten her rule book for Pre-Fall, but she has smartly added a few new pages. To start, she played around a bit with silhouette. Rarely have any of her collections put such a big emphasis on pants. Her flares looked great; they might wind up on the sales floor minus the buckled straps at mid-thigh. Quilted tech fabric skinnies could’ve come off the ski slopes or the motocross track; they added a sporty vibe to lace dresses and tunics. Denim is another area she’s largely ignored until now. Here, she patched different washes together on a shift dress and a generously proportioned pullover and skirt. Edges were left raw, like the let-out hems on much-loved jeans.Abe’s followers anticipate her cold-weather collections; few designers are as expert at a statement-making coat as she. Vying for that title this season was a trench with a removable fur collar and bell sleeves cinched at the bicep like her flares, color-blocked puffer anoraks worn back to front, and oversize patchwork parkas. The back-to-front idea may never resonate as loudly as her signature hybrids (there were plenty of those here, too), but we bet we’ll be seeing her orange and yellow shearling pullover “fleece” on the scene this time next year.
25 January 2016
Sacai’sChitose Abelanded a Nike collaboration earlier this year, and her name has come up as a possible candidate for the open creative director job atBalenciaga. We’d put her clothes in the top handful of most visible brands on the street style scene, and she’s become highly influential for other designers. So, what’s the problem? Easy: Abe’s level of popularity breeds familiarity, and as tempting as it may be to stick with what sells, she’s also aware that she must move on to maintain the level of enthusiasm and support she’s lately enjoyed.Her niche has been the concept of hybrids. Abe will combine a sweater and a button-down shirt, a tweed blazer with a biker jacket, or a kilt with a flowing chiffon skirt. For Spring, the idea was to push things further. “It’s not only about hybrids, but about distortion to get new shape,” her right-hand man,Daisuke Gemma, said afterward. “We worked very hard.” That much was clear. The foundations were familiar—vintage shop souvenir scarves, bandanas, Peruvian blankets—but where they ended up was somewhere way, way beyond basic. These were audaciously complex clothes, constructed from many layers and with a sense of disarray—straps spilling suggestively off shoulders, slashed waistbands falling slack at the hips—intentionally built in.It was chaotic, just like Paradise Garage was back in the day. (The New York City ’80s club’s logo tees appeared here, as they did in her men’s collection back in June.) But it was controlled chaos. Abe belongs to an elite group of the most ingenious designers working today. The navy and gold floral pieces (not lace, she pointed out backstage, but embroideries with the negative space laser-cut away) are about to become as ubiquitous as all of the Sacai pieces outside the shows today.
5 October 2015
When viewing the Sacai men's and Resort collections side by side, the notion of being cut from the same cloth feels simultaneously accurate and insufficient. Because of course, Sacai articles rarely result from cloth in the singular sense. Yet there was something exciting about the overlap between these two offerings—that the buffalo checks, Peruvian patterning, and original Paradise Garage muscleman logo were equally distributed. The sharing of such haphazard elements also reinforced what Sacai's go-to guy, Daisuke Gemma, described as a "chaotic" jumble of gender, era, and reference. Even so, it was easy enough to identify the source material, like the classic M1-A bomber jacket coaxed into a long parka in starry lace, or tweaked so that the orange lining extended past the leather shell. A misaligned boater sweater and the two-for-one trench parka attested to all the added workmanship—and consequently upped your desire because you know they've undergone several cycles of evolution from their humble beginnings.When the permutations seemed less clear (the tiles of multicolored lace might nod to Arts and Crafts or Gerhardt Richter), you ultimately realized the guessing game doesn't much matter. What does—what always has—are Chitose Abe's volumes, which remained fearless in their deviations. In addition to all the familiar A-line variations and deflated balloons, she explored longer lengths in this collection, whether with modern-day transparency or else in the same manner as her now-signature Edwardian collars. This new, comparatively easy softness will not go unnoticed among those who admire but feel overwhelmed by Sacai's silhouettes. Likewise the two dresses that suggest Abe stretching out her wings into eveningwear. Reduced down to robes with sweatshirt-style silk pleated accents and just one angle of exposure (back or leg), their design brought stunning order to the chaos.
30 June 2015
The soundtrack throbbed and bleeped into gear with Aleem's "Release Yourself" and faded out with Donna Summer's "I Feel Love"—memories of a club moment in the early 1980s, the club being Paradise Garage, legend in its own time and inspiration for the new collection from Sacai. Daisuke Gemma, the label's spokesman, mentioned "a hybrid of all periods and places and genders," a beautiful chaos that he felt was perfectly symbolized by the Garage, whose logo was scattered across the collection. In the same spirit, there were buffalo checks next to fern-printed pj's, storm flaps on tailored jackets, knit flight jackets, fractured Argyles, Peruvian patterns, high-collared bibs, and elegant beaded wraps. And the ubiquitous sandals and socks, a given for Spring 2016.The idea, said Gemma, was a kid waking up and grabbing clothes from a pile on the floor, a random compilation of items that somehow took direction from his own innate sense of style. This crash course for the ravers was, of course, shaped by the fact that the pile was actually Sacai's Spring collection, which, in each outfit's corralling of a dozen elements, had a complexity that was reflected in its layered clubby/grungy look on the catwalk. The layers at first seemed heavy for a Spring outing, but the buffalo checks were a light mesh, and the high-collared shirts were bibs, and the storm flaps were detachable, so everything could be stripped back. You wanted to see that happen, to see the models go wild to the pulsing soundtrack, to see the clothesmove.Things like that used to happen in fashion shows, way back in the glory days of places like the Paradise Garage. But no more, especially not when the show is staged, as this one was, in the imperious arena of the Bourse, the old Stock Exchange. Still, the spirit is always willing. And, fortunately, the flesh is always weak. There will be dancing…later.
27 June 2015
Chitose Abe has lately been confronting a situation experienced by all super-influential designers: how to satisfy shoppers who are perfectly thrilled with her status quo (so much so that a hundred copycats at the high and low ends of the price spectrum have sprung up in her wake) and how to sufficiently challenge herself.For Fall, she came up with something that echoes the mash-ups that she's known for but subtly pushed her vocabulary forward. Instead of back-to-front hybrids, Abe experimented with silhouette, taking men's-sized garments and shrinking them down for a woman's form. To get a sense of what we're talking about, study the first coat that hit the runway. See the way the shoulders are dropped and the sleeves extend almost to the tips of the fingers? She liked the oversize proportion and the way those dropped seams created a broader but rounder and softer silhouette.The shape carried over into most of her outerwear, which was a sensation as usual, with generous tufts of fur peeking out from the collars, cuffs, and sleeves of wool and tweed coats. And she also used it for softer pieces like scarf-print dresses and knitwear. Abe sliced and diced every last shred of tradition out of her fisherman sweaters, adding cable-knit sleeves to a shirtdress that retained the masculine proportion of a man's flannel shirt or combining them with cotton poplin to create flirtier numbers.In the end, the newness here was of the incremental sort, which explains the backstage excitement around a leather parka with a wild mane of macramé fringe. Its earthiness was a bit of a one-off here, and it suggested Abe might have something crafty up her sleeve for next season. The other big development came at the end of the show in the form of three looks made from a blanket stripe wool in hard-to-miss neon pink, yellow, and green. It's been a while since Abe embraced color so wholeheartedly; we wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
9 March 2015
Unlikely combinations are the essence of Sacai. One of the most striking looks in this collection was a huge, thick-fringed herringbone poncho over jogging pants, with silver Birkenstocks to anchor the look. Somehow raw and polished at the same time, in the same way that there were any number of other looks that combined a countrified, almost rustic feel, heavy on the texture (and flowerpot hats), with something distinctly sly and urban. The shearlings, for instance. Shearling pants? They'd bring a delightfully goatish feel to city streets. And the trim matching trio of herringbone—jacket, sweater, and long muffler—would grace a sophisticate in town or country. The color palette was accordingly city gray and country earth, with incongruous flashes of bright blue and orange, a typically disorienting Sacai touch. They combined in a plaid duffel, another standout piece.Unlikely combinations have often meant trompe l'oeil twists in Chitose Abe's collections, but this one actually felt pretty direct, maybe even more grown-up than previously. There was a strong military edge (the leopard spot could have been camo—or plushy pajamas). The guts of the collection were still in Abe's endlessly fascinating fabrics, though: bonding, quilting, fusing, reversed jacquards, wovens that were actually made from boiled jersey. So if there was maybe a little lesstrompethan usual,l'oeilstill felt pleasurably teased.
24 January 2015
Chitose Abe's rise was steady rather than swift until the moment three years ago when she swapped a presentation format for the Paris runway. Since then her popularity and her influence (see J.Crew's current catalog, for starters) have exploded. Abe ranks among fashion's most ingenious pattern-makers, but her real talent lies in the fact that she's able to turn her complex propositions into clothes that are easy to wear and look great on so many different kinds of women. A game of Spot the Sacai can keep you entertained through endless hours waiting for fashion shows to start.For Spring, Abe united two of the season's important trends—army fatigues and flower-child prints (war and peace, if you will)—in one electric collection. Abe's countrywoman and onetime boss Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons took up the subject of global unrest a few days ago. Their shows are miles apart, but their ideas echo each other. Abe's collection was about collisions, not just military order and floral disorder (or should that be military disorder and floral order?) but also masculinity and femininity, and discipline and freedom. The push-pull made for some typically great clothes: a crisp army green shirtdress backed with flowing floral pleats, a mariniere-stripe top extravagantly edged in white guipure lace, an officer's coat inserted with delicate chiffon plissé. The pin-striped Saharienne mashup was particularly satisfying—just the thing for the concrete jungle.As usual, there was a good deal of trompe l'oeil. The ivory silk blouse, quilted green vest, and brass-buttoned skirt Julia Nobis wore? Not three pieces, but one attached at the back—or at least it appeared that way when she marched by on her patent platforms. We'll definitely be spotting that Sacai on the streets a year from now.
29 September 2014
One of Chitose Abe's womenswear signatures at Sacai is artful layering-which-isn't-exactly-layered. It's more of a trompe l'oeil effect. But in Sacai's new collection for men, the layers were real. In fact, a new approach to layering was the starting point: a nylon blouson laid over tailored pinstripes, say, or a hoodie over a parka. That sounds like mere willful designer trickery in theory, but it didn'tlookthat way in practice, because everything was so light and casual and bare-leg sporty, with a new Birkenstock collaboration providing footwear to match.A coat that self-belted to one side, fitted to the body there and loose on the other side, was quintessential Sacai, but otherwise, an appetite for utility took over the collection, with bombers and cargo shorts and camo. "It's a uniform in a modern way," said spokesperson Daisuke Gemma, "but we don't like to talk about the army." Still, itwasthe camo that provided the most special effects. Abe started with a basic Swedish pattern, took some things out, put other things in, and ended up with a very pleasing abstract, which was overprinted on pinstripes and herringbone for coats, tops, and pants. It was playful; it was Pop. It was, in other words, Sacai to a camo-printed T.Something else for the record: Whether you are man, woman, or child, a Sacai parka will forever be a thing of joy.
27 June 2014
The show of the season? There are still a few days and several important names left on the Paris calendar, but Chitose Abe's new Sacai collection set the bar very high today. Anyone familiar with her clothes will recognize the inventive one-thing-in-front, another-thing-in-back construction of the pieces on her runway. That said, there was an irresistible new swagger to these clothes. The furs were furrier, collars stood up higher, and the trompe l'oeil twists were even more head-spinning than usual.If Abe is feeling bolder, there's excellent reason. Suddenly, she's super-influential. Designers with much bigger profiles have been looking at the way she combines a tailored jacket with a parka, or a puffer with a fur, and incorporating similar kinds of mash-ups into their own collections. Backstage she said she wasn't aware that she'd become fashion's standard-bearer. We believe her. Abe lives and works in Tokyo, far from the kind of cross-pollination that designers get used to in Paris.For Fall, she focused on expanding her brand DNA by experimenting with wrapping and adding versatility to individual garments. On the runway, gaps in plissé kilts revealed flashes of hip and upper thigh, but in real life they could be worn discreetly closed. As complicated as her patterns must be, the clothes rarely landed on the wrong side of conceptual. In other news, rich dévoré velvets were spliced with cable knits on looks that split the difference between night and day, and scarf-print silks were layered on top of each other with vivid results.What really made an impression, though, was Abe's outerwear. Putting the statement in statement coat, she married a Mongolian lamb biker jacket with an orange Prince of Wales man's coat, and made an equally persuasive case for an unlikely sporty zip-front jacket and colorful serape wrap combo. The show crescendoed with a group of shearling-strewn down puffer hybrids of such fabulousness that Sacai fans will be fighting over them come Fall.
2 March 2014
The tide has turned. Once upon a time, Sacai's menswear hung on rails in a showroom without much company in the way of visitors. From there, it was a presentation on mannequins to a few early adopters in a nearly silent gallery. Those were the days. Today's live presentation didn't just seem packed because each of the twenty-six models stood facing a mirror, essentially doubling the body count as well as cleverly offering 360-degree views of a collection that often looks different from every angle. It seemed packed because clustered around every model were a handful of editors chantingI want that, I want that, I want that.The vox pop is not the last word in fashion criticism, of course. But the voice of the crowd registered all the louder because Sacai's Chitose Abe doesn't come to town to explain her menswear. (Based in Tokyo, she reserves her visits to Paris for her women's shows.) She simply builds it, and they come. The guiding principles of a Sacai collection are fairly regular: Custom-developed fabrics, unusual combinations and collisions, and a yen for deconstruction. Here, all the parts were in play, in a collection based on the idea of bringing the inside out. Some reversible pieces were simply styled inside out to display their interior workings. Others were designed to be inside out, like the varsity jackets from which the wool had been cut away to reveal the nylon lining. Some pieces flirted with inside and outside at once, such as the knit biker jacket whose lining dangled down beneath its hem. Others offered different options outside and in, like the Chesterfield whose double-face wool was houndstooth on the outside, striped within.A skeptic might argue that it's a small slice of the fashion-buying public that's truly interested in anatomizing the finer points of their clothing's innards versus skins. But though the clothes were piled into looks like layer cakes—Abe doesn't just give fashion, she givesproduct,and a lot of it—to pick it apart was to find pieces in beautiful materials that wore their inspired weirdness lightly. If anything, this collection included fewer of the mash-ups that Sacai specializes in (wool sweatpants with nylon waistbands, cotton polos ending in drawstring hems, and so on), and more wardrobe staples of a more digestible variety: duffel coats, Chesterfields, suits, and great knitwear in Navajo and Nordic patterns.
17 January 2014
The chairs at Chitose Abe's Sacai show are arranged not in rows, but in circles, and she has the models do figure eights up the runway. This season that was more vital than usual. Abe has infused her clothes, which have always had a 360-degree appeal (from the front they look like one thing, from the back another), with new couture volumes for Spring. She opened with a sack-back dress, its excess fabric reined in by a ribbed sweatshirt band. To follow, there was a skirt-and-top look, the latter of which jutted out from the upper back so exuberantly, it was as if the model was keeping a knapsack under there. Nothing stuffy about either piece, though, despite the old-world connotations of haute couture. That has to do with the modern way Abe constructed the collection's sack-back silhouettes, cocoon coats, and trapeze dresses out of sporty fabrics.The unexpected mix is the essence of Abe's aesthetic; what we saw here was trademark Sacai, only supercharged. Previously she's preferred tonal shades, but today she turned up the brights: sky blue, emerald green, highlighter pink, and an electric coral that looked good with neon orange. The floral print that she used for a trompe l'oeil dress and gown (they looked like duchesse satin sweatshirt and chiffon skirt combos) was another surprise. But where Abe got really creative was with the show's menswear materials. True, they're more of a common sight at Sacai, but not the way the designer treated them this season. A Prince of Wales check that she bonded and laser-cut to resemble athletic mesh appeared as the sleeves of a baseball-jersey sweater that looked as if it was layered over a suit jacket and skirt in that check. It was a mash-up of a mash-up of a mash-up. But let's not overthink things: What it was was one hell of a clever dress, in one hell of a clever collection.
29 September 2013
For Chitose Abe's Sacai presentation, she set up a series of high-def cameras and trained them on the models as they ascended their gallery plinths. On screens behind them, details of their outfits appeared: a binocular swoop onto hems and cuffs, fabrics, and the rubber-painted desert boots (by Clarks, because who improves on those?) that she customized for the show. It's not every designer whose work stands up to that level of scrutiny, but Sacai thrives in the close-up. Her odd combinations of fibers, patterns, even genres of clothing—she's famous for shirts that end with panels of drawstring-laced nylon, like windbreakers—can't be called subtle, and yet, like a magic trick, you find yourself staring, trying to see how they work.This season, she turned her attention to traditional menswear patterns and to florals. Both are well-worn territory, but Abe's a dab hand. She printed houndstooth and Prince of Wales on nylon jackets and shirts, layering them to glossy, twinset effect. College-scarf stripes, picked out in grosgrain, were great on a hooded parka, layered over a matching sweatshirt. And Abe's jacquard florals, densely packed together on dark, neutral colors, took on a camouflage effect. Even the simplest pieces, like a two-tone polo that suggested a shirt collar flapping over a sweater, had a little spark. Abe doesn't bother with themes, backstories, or explanations. Nor does she come in from Japan for the show. The clothes speak for themselves. It's to their credit that they tell their story convincingly, even—maybe especially—at 10x zoom.
28 June 2013
Sacai's Chitose Abe has been at her hybridized mash-ups for years, but they just don't get boring. This was another outstanding outing for the Japanese designer, one that once more demonstrated how sensitive she is to the conceptual-commercial mix. Her trick this season was to choose iconic—predictable, even—Fall staples and spin them into something genuinely desirable. Trenchcoats, English hunting suits, skiwear, and biker jackets were the pieces in question. In Abe's hands, they looked both familiar and surprising.Take the trench. She broke it down to its elements and fused parts to different garments. A navy velvet dress got an olive-drab cape back and collar, while a navy sweater acquired epaulets and a welted belt. As for those plaid hunting suits, they were spliced with technical nylon or fur, the hems of the jackets becoming peplums above flared pants. The après-ski section delivered the most news. Cozy sweaters with zebra patterns below a deep line of feather fringe looked fresh for Abe, and a pair of down puffers edged with fox were flashier than usual for her. They'll be hits.The leather Perfecto pieces, married to double-breasted coats or a long velvet trapeze dress, recalled one of Junya Watanabe's most beloved collections. Watanabe, of course, was once her boss, so this felt more like a heartfelt homage than pilfering. She picked up the fine art of sampling from him, anyway. All around, fabulous.
3 March 2013
Chitose Abe's Sacai is the tortoise, not the hare. Abe has built her business slowly, methodically, earning the kind of under-the-radar status that can't be bought or pitched. To a new convert to her label, that can be frustrating. Abe rarely gives interviews, at least in these parts—she speaks little English—and doesn't stage a formal show, or even a model presentation, for her men's collection. A bare gallery space full of mannequins is all she offers. She once did the same for women's, it should be noted. She now does a full show, densely attended and styled by the in-demand Karl Templer. That example counsels patience. Good things come to those who wait.It's hard to pin down what's so appealing about Abe's menswear. She's a mistress of the mix, throwing together different fabrics, colors, and textures with a gonzo, though practiced, hand: This season found her working with more hardy English fabrics than usual, like a beautiful series of tweeds, but in combination with nylon, puffer padding, and silk. And she's catholic where process is concerned: To color some knits, she hand-weaves, for a subtle striation; for others, she simply spray-dyes the parts. Piled-on looks of field jacket, silk foulard-print pants, and fuzzy, lamb's-fur sweater are hardly a beginner's game, but almost any individual piece—in particular, the tweedy tailoring—is easy to love.The menswear has been slow to break into the U.S. market, but strides worldwide—the must-visit Tokyo Sacai shop, the prime shop-in-shop at the new Dover Street Market Ginza—will soon be matched by this American one: the arrival of the menswear to Barneys for Spring. One more lap in the race.
18 January 2013
By the time Chitose Abe's Sacai show wrapped up this morning, we were already two for two. Both Abe and Stella McCartney an hour earlier were talking backstage about combining masculine and feminine. Abe got more specific about her intentions this season: "Contrasting workwear with feminine aspects of clothes." The boy/girl mix was a fixation of hers for Fall, so it was smart of the designer to add the utility spin. It's a point of difference that gave this collection a more casual feel than her previous one, and, intentionally or not, a more wallet-friendly price tag.Not that sticker resistance seems to be much of an issue here. Clever clothes like Abe's are rare and, if the swarms of retailers in her packed-to-the-rafters show was anything to go by, hard to resist. Abe has a special knack for outerwear; we've clocked her jackets in the crowds all over the Paris shows. On the runway today, a pair of swingy parkas with feather-lined hoods looked particularly great. One came in olive drab and navy cotton canvas, the other in railroad stripes—two of the fabrics holding up the utility side of the equation, while lace, embroidered tulle, and silk scarf prints represented femininity.Most of the time, Abe's Spring pieces were different front-to-back. What looked like a pair of trousers in that olive drab turned to reveal a long, split navy silk skirt; a knit cardigan was peplumed on the rear hem with cotton canvas; and one gray sweatshirt dress flared out in an A-line bustle of engineer stripes. There was a lot going on—Abe is no minimalist. But if the vertically spliced carwash skirts were too busy, the rest of the collection really worked.
30 September 2012
"All the models want the clothes," reported stylist Karl Templer, working with designer Chitose Abe for the first time, after today's show. It's little surprise. Abe makes clothes that somehow turn the conceptual into something that could actually hit a city street. And desire for her clothes isn't limited to the young, beautiful, and thin. To wit, she recently had to close the second floor of her newish Tokyo boutique because she just ran out of product to fill it.Abe explained that this season focused on menswear. It's a motif carried over from Spring, but in heavier cold-weather fabrics it took on a moreVictor Victoriavibe. A dark chesterfield, worn over a prim white button-down, turned to reveal flaring pleats inset with royal blue knit; motorcycle jackets spilled collars of ruffled shearling, which snaked around the waist to form a peplum. Abe doesn't often use prints, so it was nice to see a rich sartorial paisley scarf print, particularly great in a narrowish skirt collaged with a red satin and lace slip and layered with red chiffon.The outerwear was strong, but dresses sang too. One standout merged the classic oxford blue shirt and camel skirt with a siren gown by picking out the silhouette of its sweetheart neckline and curvy waist in sequins. When it made the turn, you saw the rest of the lace and satin slip that peeked out from its hem via a high and wide slit meant to give the impression that the model forgot to zip her skirt. It sounds excruciatingly tricky on paper, but in reality, it works. That was part of the beauty of the collection.It's nice to see Abe on ever-bigger stages, like her substantial shop-in-shop at the new Dover Street Market in Ginza, not to mention a well-attended runway show with a high-ticket stylist. But she's a quiet powerhouse who took years to grow and learn before entering the spotlight. Young designers should take note of a business model that stands the test of time.
4 March 2012
Chitose Abe's slow burn is starting to feel like a nice blaze. Less than a month ago, the Sacai designer opened her first flagship store in Tokyo's chic Aoyama neighborhood, and today she staged her first runway show for an enviable audience of All Those Who Matter.Abe's Spring collection didn't wilt on the bigger stage. In fact, it was probably her most refined work to date. She continued her sweet subversion of sartorial codes, using menswear elements to trim the cute factor. Trapeze dresses were cut in shirting, one with painted-on stripes, and another with a trompe l'oeil cabled sweater fronting the look to give it definition, at least on the way in. The venerable gold-buttoned blazer, meanwhile, got shaped into an hourglass.There was also a great tension of the prim and the sexy—the chic peekaboo of sweet eyelet dresses giving a PG glimpse of the briefs beneath. A crisp and proper white linen shirt and pleated skirt turned to reveal an open back and the swing of a sheer skirt with a barely detectable lace slip beneath; a ladylike cardigan and camisole came with another sheer pleated skirt, and all offending parts were covered by the long tails of the cami. Those are both one-piece looks, mind you. Abe's skill, honed over a decade, at Frankenstein-ing it all together means that she's done the work for you. As she said after the show, "It's made in a complex way, but it's easy to wear."
29 September 2011
This season it seems like you can't throw your show ticket without hitting a hybridized or mixed-media article of clothing, but both are ideas that Sacai's Chitose Abe has been turning over for several seasons. Like she did for Spring, for Fall Abe continued splicing lingerie elements into decidedly non-boudoir clothes—this time heavier stuff like ski-worthy woolly knits and sturdy nylon bombers.You could see the wine-hued slip peeking from the front of a gray cable-knit sweater dress, and on the return you saw a full neck-to-knee inset slice of satin and lace. A lovely blouson bouclé sweatshirt was pieced with lace shoulders. Along with the play between outside and in, there was tension between day and evening. Abe repeatedly used an iridescent burgundy silk that would usually be more at home on a ball gown than cut into hot-pink-striped tuxedo pants worn with a patch-pocketed cargo vest-cum-waffle cardigan.Like many of her fellow Japanese designers—including her former employers Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe—Abe's not interested in re-creation so much as reinterpretation. But she has always been more commercially minded. To wit, she built her business for several years before courting any press. The point of difference with Abe is that her twists on the closet canon might surprise, but they're never meant to repel or provoke.Abe's work might have a slow burn, but it did glow a little brighter for Fall as she did four mini-shows, perhaps a step closer to the runway. Or not. To see these clothes in motion but still at close range might just be ideal.
2 March 2011
The term "tweaked classic" is one of those fashion-isms that's so well-worn as to be nearly meaningless. Perhaps what Sacai designer Chitose Abe does is better described as remixing the canon of sartorial codes. It's certainly a few notches above changing a fabrication or a cut. The approach is one she shares with, say, fellow Japanese designer Junya Watanabe, but Abe has a knack for marrying wearability with concept. (She was in business for several years before diving into the fashion-week pond.) That knack was likely the cause of all the "oohs" and "aahs" emanating from the fashion crowd that had made a point of stopping by her presentation after Zac Posen's show.This season, Abe focused on injecting luxury and volume into casual retail all-stars like trenches, nautical tops, and cabled knits. That meant blouse-y satin gussets set into the sides of caped and cropped trenches, and sleeveless flak jackets that zipped open to reveal the ends of a cashmere cardigan sewn inside. Flaring, pleated skirts came in one piece with a lacy slip. Elsewhere, Abe printed sailor stripes on a paisley cardigan with chiffon gussets that laced up the side in keeping with her "ahoy, matey" motif.Abe develops all her own fabrics, and the highlight this season was a chiffon flocked with velvet and printed plaid. At times, it read as country gear, and at others as a nifty new tweed—but both read chic.Though the clothes were presented on dress forms, each had a charming pair of Christian Louboutin pumps—either with pearl ankle straps or feather-trimmed—sitting at its base. Sadly, those won't be produced, but watch this space: Abe told us her next wearably cool and conceptual frontier is footwear.
29 September 2010
Everything is not what it seems at Sacai. What looks like a Rue Cambon skirtsuit reveals itself upon closer inspection to be a tweedy sleeveless vest topping a blouse with the same tweedy sleeves. (Designer Chitose Abe's mannequin presentation makes it possible to spot the difference.) The skirt, by the way, appears to have shirttails peeking out between the pleats, but that's another optical illusion. Meanwhile, the back of a deceptively simple cable-knit sweater dress is actually a cotton poplin shirt spliced to a flaring wool miniskirt. If all that sounds like heavy-handed gimmickry, it's not. Sacai's way of tweaking classics, splicing the masculine with the feminine, and dissecting and reconstructing familiar items is utterly charming. What makes it smart and gives the label's clothes a point of difference on the sales floor is the way, say, the white pearl-embroidered slip underneath a charcoal knit blazer is detachable. That provides the woman who wears it more than two looks in one—the lacy little extra can potentially be worn under countless other pieces already in her wardrobe.Joining those multitaskers in Abe's strong lineup were substantial Fair Isle knits, draped silk scarf dresses, and schoolboy-ish toggle coats with girlish flared sleeves, along with some clever gloves trimmed at the wrist with pearls, silver chain, and a spray of tulle. Who needs jewelry?
3 March 2010
Whatever is going on in fashion, Sacai somehow manages to jumble all the best bits into a delightful microcosm of it. In her inimitable Japanese way, Chitose Abe has softened, detailed, and miniaturized the utilitywear, shirtdresses, sporty gray marl, raw edges, tulle, frills, and metallics in the air for Spring. Prime example: In a season of kilts, her fresh, preppy madras-checked cotton skirts with multiple layers of fan-pleated fins at the sides are potential qualifiers for Best in Class.Abe's knack involves subtly combining fabrics. The front of a garment is rarely the same as the back (knits with sheer chiffon panels), and a piece that begins as one thing at the top often becomes something else at the bottom (a shirt ends up with a tutu-ish skirt, a trench turns into a shirt, etc.). This approach means that her things cause comments of the "I can't believe I've discovered this" kind at stores like Dover Street Market. She learned her methods at Comme des Garçons, specialized in knitwear working under Junya Watanabe, and has patiently been building up a following over ten years. Given those kilts, though, maybe next season won't be quite as quiet as before.
2 October 2009