Oct 5, 20202 min read

You Will Be Missed Mr Kenzo!

Paris

October 5,2020

Yesterday, we have lost another legend, Mr. Kenzo Takada, founder of the ready-to-wear house "Kenzo". October 4, 2020, the brand representative Announced that the 81 years old designer died from the Covid-19 at the American Hospital of Neuilly.

Kenzo Takada

Born in 1939 in the city of Himeji, he studied fashion at the prestigious Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo. After graduation, he had traveled to France by boat in the early 1960s.

Takada opened his first Parisian boutique in 1970. The stylist brought poetry, acidic colors, a language of exoticism between East and West from his native country: Japan. His first men collection dates from 1983, and his first perfume (Kenzo Kenzo) from 1988.

Avant-garde, he made his shows to be some innovative celebrations: He parades mannequins on white horses, blooms the Pont Neuf for the first day of summer, installs a field of Poppy on the forecourt of the Centre Pompidou, ... It should be noted that Kenzo was one of the first to make his friends wall on the catwalk instead of "real" models: Grace Jones, Guy Cuevas and Jaime Santiago.

In 1993, he sold his brand to the LVMH group for 73 million euros. He left the house six years later to put an end to the infernal rhythm of collections and devote himself to more punctual projects such as decoration, design, and painting. In 2009, he sold his Japanese house in the Bastille district of Paris and auctioned off his art collection at the same time.

France, The Country Of His Heart

The stylist, who thought he was only in Paris for 6 months, finally put down his luggage in France in 1968 "I now feel more Parisian than Japanese, but if I had to do it again today, I'm not sure I'd still come to Paris," he told Paris Match in 1989...

Already, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Kenzo Takada received in June 2016 the insignia of Knight of the Legion of Honor from the President of the Constitutional Council Laurent Fabius, who then paid tribute to "one of the most Parisian of Japanese designers".

Maintaining his eternal teenage look, the designer had come out of a 20-year retreat earlier this year to launch a design line.