PARIS —The Japanese designer Chitose Abe begins crafting a garment by ripping another one apart. She sometimes starts with a leather biker jacket, a canvas military bomber or perhaps a wool car coat. In her hands, each is little more than a toile — a version of a garment in its infancy, something still being considered. Abe deconstructs it, lowering the waist or shifting the position of the shoulder or hacking off the entire back panel and replacing it with a block of shaggy teddy-bear fur.
Abe doesn’t sketch. That’s far too sedate an activity for someone who is unabashed in her desire to demolish and rebuild. Her philosophy is simple but daunting. “It’s about taking something familiar and making it into something unfamiliar,” Abe says.
Her label is called Sacai, a play on her maiden name, Sakai, which rhymes with “sigh,” and her clothes — beautiful, delightful, bold — are the result of aesthetic grafting.
From the front, a woman wearing one of her garments looks as though she’s slipped into a simple cotton shirtdress, but the back view suggests that it’s actually an oversize sweatshirt pulled low over a lace skirt. So is she wearing three pieces or two? Or just one? Abe enjoys tricking the eye with clothes that make an observer strain to suss out the reality. Which begs the question: Why does it matter? The answer: Because clothes provide a shorthand declaration of a person’s public identity. Abe makes understanding that identity a more complicated and engaging proposition.
Abe doesn’t indulge in these tricks because she’s an impish tease or a self-absorbed artist. She’s a focused and successful entrepreneur who owns her company and answers only to herself. She is part of a grand lineage of Japan-born designers whose urbane, non-Western ideas wield global influence. And she is a working mother, aiming to create clothes that make sense for a wide swath of women — who she hopes will slip into her garments “and feel powerful and comfortable and confident.”
Her work is born of a desire “to do something different and fun and not always elegant” — at least not in the traditional girly sense. “A lot of the pieces come from menswear,” Abe explains. “They’re things that have been spliced together.” There are activewear references, military flourishes, Yeti allusions and a hint of the rebellious flower child.
Her clothes, which range from $400 for a mixed-media T-shirt to well over $4,000 for a lace-paneled coat, have found an audience among fashion aficionados. Even first lady Michelle Obama has worn a Sacai belt. Abe’s work sells.
“People love the classic yet updated look. They love the quirkiness,” says Nancy Pearlstein, owner of Georgetown’s Relish. “And they love the ease of it.”
And the clothes work for a multitude of occasions. “These clothes have gone to the grocery store, to a board meeting, to a TED talk,” Chicago retailer Ikram Goldman says. “It runs the gamut.”
A global audience
When the White House celebrated Japan’s economy, history and culture with a state dinner in honor of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday, fashion was in the spotlight — not least because Michelle Obama typically chooses a gown with the honored country in mind. (For the dinner, she wore a dress by Japanese-born Tadashi Shoji. Chitose Abe (pronounced Chee-TOH-say AH-bay and no relation to the prime minister) is one of dozens of Japanese designers who present their collections in Paris, the fashion industry’s most international stage.
It is dangerous to generalize based on national origin, and certainly, Japanese designers who show collections to a global audience offer a variety of sensibilities, from the haute couture-influenced tailoring of Yohji Yamamoto to the street-inspired classicism of Undercover’s Jun Takahashi.
Yet as a group, Japanese designers bring a less trend-driven approach to design. They offer a non-Western relationship to the female form, steering clear of overt Hollywood sex appeal and sexual provocation.
“The Japanese are very good at taking English classic tailoring and making it new and innovative, whether with the fabric or the design. They do it in a fabulous way; no one can touch them,” Pearlstein says. “My eye is immediately drawn to it. I need that foundation of the past — otherwise (a design) just looks too way out.”
Abe’s bomber jacket “is a very classic thing. She adds an underpinning that’s quilted. She uses colors that are saturated but understated,” as well as a cloud of fur attached to the collar, Pearlstein notes. “But, somehow, it all works.”
Urban aesthetic
Abe, 49, is petite with thick, cascading black hair. She does not speak much English and describes her life and work with the help of a publicist who translates.
Abe doesn’t think her collection is distinctive to Japan so much as to a hectic, urban existence — life in Tokyo but also Washington, London or Paris. “You dress for work and take the train to work, and you don’t have time to change for every function,” Abe says.
“The clothes are intuitive. I can’t explain what’s right or wrong about them. Of course, I look at the balance sheet, but it shouldn’t be about the balance sheet, it’s about what works and what doesn’t,” she says. “If something doesn’t sell, it’s my fault.”
Perhaps most important to the aesthetics of her brand is Abe’s independence. While other designers of her generation seem in constant pursuit of investors and collaborators, Abe has steered clear of partners. “I didn’t want to be told that something’s not good for sales.”
On the day after her fall 2015 fashion show in March, retailers descended on Abe’s temporary Paris showroom on Rue du Mail to make their selections for the coming season. Sacai has grown significantly since those first five pieces to include audacious runway showstoppers as well as simpler garments that hang in the showroom.
“If you have a PTA meeting, you can still wear Sacai,” she says. There’s a secondary line, menswear and a flagship store in Tokyo, too. Annual sales have been reported at $25 million, although the privately held company doesn’t comment on revenue.
The collection isn’t finished. It never is. Abe continues to evaluate each piece, adjusting the fit, perhaps adding a zipper to make a coat more practical or a dress easier to slip into. One season informs the next.
Women’s Global Empowerment Fund spring luncheon
When: May 6
Where: RedLine, 2350 Arapahoe St.
Time: 11:30 a.m.- 1 p.m.
Speakers: WGEF client Aloyojok Prisca and Chenaya Devine Milbourne, Urban Decay’s global marketing coordinator
Tickets: $60, available at
