The Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada has died in Paris after contracting Covid-19, a spokesperson has announced. He was 81.
Takada, known best by his first name, was the first designer from Japan to break into the city’s exclusive fashion milieu in the 1970s.
His prêt-à-porter designs with their trademark profusion of bright colours, flowers and jungle prints were a far cry from the traditional Parisian mode of the time, when chic salon presentations were largely prim and proper affairs.
Kenzo, who died at the American hospital on Sunday, was famous not only for his clothes, but went on to create a global brand of perfume and skin products. At the time of his death he was acting honorary president of the Asian Couture Federation.
Born in February 1939, at Himeji near Osaka, his parents ran a hotel. He was fascinated by fashion at an early age, reading his sisters’ magazines and being interested in their sewing lessons. In 1958, after the death of his father, he enrolled at the Bunka fashion college in Tokyo, one of the previously all-female establishment’s first intake of male students.
After graduating he worked in designing women’s clothes for a department store.
The young Kenzo was inspired by French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, an interest encouraged by his teacher at Bunka who had trained in Paris.
– The Guardian
