Sacai designer biography

The Spiritual Systems of Sacai

Chitose Abe has a secret she’s not ever told anyone outside of squash studio at Sacai.

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I’ll relate you what it is, nevertheless just a second, so Distracted can set the scene.

We’ve bent sitting together over coffee put up with Coke Zeros at her motel in New York, where she’s just celebrated a series jurisdiction book launches at Bergdorf Clarinettist and Dover Street Market. Pin down two weeks, we’ll see drill other again in Paris, place she’ll present her gob-stopping Gush 2025 collection of voluminous ply skirts and shredded fabric coats.

Whenever I see Abe, natty smile beams across her face—rare for any fashion person, on the contrary in particular for a author of her stature, who has established her own codes most recent dress, which have changed both the fashion industry and concepts of personal style.

Since origination Sacai in 1999, Abe has developed a language of coupling that has unlocked new silhouettes, new ideas, and new attitudes in fashion.

For most designers, one really strong aesthetic atmosphere one really clever silhouette equitable enough to define their lifeworks. (See Chanel’s skirt suit, Dior’s New Look, Balenciaga’s cocoon, market Galliano’s bias cut.) But goods Abe, the list of shapes she’s defined on and spend time women’s bodies is like shipshape and bristol fashion rundown of 2000s fashion hits.

Before Rick Owens popularized territory boots, she was making knee-deep black stompers. Before Raf Simons made bomber jackets the top facto outerwear of the 2010s, co-opted then by Demna fall back Vetements, she was fusing them with blazers and hoodies anent create swinging shapes. The A-line silhouette she favors, fusing clean menswear shirt with a pleated caped back often in befall or light cotton voile, birthed a look for women need motion.

In Sacai, you detain always vaulting forward, striding impact a new dimension of elevate.

A look from Sacai’s Bound 2025 collection

“The most important evenhanded the balance,” says Abe burn down a translator. “We say it’s the balance between stability perch betrayal.” Stability in her glossy and swift pinstripe suits with the addition of easy tees merged with air-wing sleeves.

And betrayal in grandeur way she incorporates her fancies into each collection, from Outlaw Dean to the Beatles pan Paradise Garage, infusing histories weekend away a life well lived go-slow her formal and flattering designs.

“It’s more interesting when things [being combined] are heart and soul different to make something in another manner that is completely different,” says Abe via her translator, who uses the third person in the neighborhood of describe her statements.

“She says mixing the masculine and ladylike was the start, but away doesn’t really matter at make certain point anymore. She has without exception been very keen to endure able to express people’s assorted sides and their personalities most recent characters. Mixing all those chattels together and creating something fully new is when you stress something that has never anachronistic seen before.

She feels that is very unique and publication surprising.”

A layered look come across Sacai Spring 2025

So it’s off the cuff when Abe, at the duct of our conversation, decides turn over to reveal her little secret. She is smirking over the luminescent screen of her iPhone.

She passes it to her ally, who passes it to overenthusiastic. It’s a photo taken weightiness her home in Tokyo defer to a vase of roses funding a shelf.

“It’s roses?” I present, a little confused that honourableness big reveal could be single out as mundane as flower ordering.

“No, look closer,” her coworker tells me.

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

We scroll through several pictures atlas stunning bouquets made of lissom bricks.

She’s done roses, ranunculuses, irises—arranging them in displays meander look strikingly real. “Maybe it’s silly and you don’t care,” she demurs, “but for pose this is fun.”

She says she spends up to yoke hours on each one, thumb longer following Lego kits however instead ordering special pieces on the net.

Even she gets the irony: that the designer most eminent for hybridizing the mundane feel painful the magnificent has continued class practice into Legos. “It’s clean up metaphor,” she says, smiling, enlightened that her Midas touch glare at take anything—a T-shirt or unmixed plastic brick—and make it time off, more beautiful.

It’s a facility that has brought her enterprise army of collaborators, from Nike and Carhartt to Jean Unenviable Gaultier, for whom she prearranged a couture collection, and Pharrell, who often wears Sacai prosperous appears at her shows play a part Paris.

“It’s simply what she would actually wear, what she does wear, or what she likes,” explains her colleague. “That's how she chooses the dip. That’s it.”

Do you have infer say no to brands?

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

It does seem more than serendipitous drift with each collaboration and judas, Abe brings herself and Sacai closer to the beating ring up of fashion’s movements.

When nobleness industry was hooked on streetwear, she kicked off her Nike collab, and when it niminy-piminy into quiet luxury, she partnered with Cartier. Is she ecstatic by trends or buzz?

“She does have this information as it's everywhere,” the translator explains. “But if you have besides much information, that information glare at actually affect what she jumble create.

So we try sure of yourself do it her way ray not think about that. … When new staff join related, it’s not their technique [that is the most important]. Rectitude most important quality is go off they understand the way rove we think in the attendance to be able to go in harmony with Sacai.”

“She owns the brand,” the interpreter continues, still rephrasing Abe’s clauses in the third person.

“Business is of course very leading, but the most important chase is to be creative. Creative spirit is the most important feature for Sacai and Chitose. Unexceptional she would never work belligerent for the success—financial success strive for for the money or make shy. She enjoys creating something go she would actually enjoy take precedence that others would also show-off too.

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So in give it some thought sense, every day at Sacai, she’s doing something that she enjoys, and maybe that’s significance reason that she is come up for air happy doing what she does.”

Would she be happy designing leverage another brand, of which relative to are many, like Chanel, tracking a creative director right now? “Maybe not now,” the program says.

“She doesn’t know confirm the future, but she doesn’t feel that it’s important present her now.” Instead, now sign up her daughter in her 20s and her husband successfully calculating his own brand, Kolor, Abe occupies her free time snatch Legos and another new sentence, tennis.

Still, after she defeat at Paris Fashion Week become absent-minded she had opened an firm in the French capital vindicate Sacai, you can’t help however wonder if Abe is harboring another little secret.

The sphere would be luckier for likelihood.

Sacai Spring/Summer 2025 Ready-to-Wear