He is rarely mentioned, and since he is showing in Paris in a couple of days I thought this would be quite appropriate. 
i-D Magazine / i-dmagazine.com
Text by Josh Sims
i-D Magazine / i-dmagazine.com
Text by Josh Sims
For the past twenty years he has been quietly shaping the vision and the direction of Japanese fashion. Now, the elusive Naoki Takizawa is finally stepping into the spotlight.
It will have been a long time coming, but eventually we may be able to sit back and enjoy the new science fiction novel by Naoki Takizawa. “I have a busy imagination, and lots of dreams to put down,” he says. This may come as no surprise were Takizawa a novelist. Look around and, unfamiliar though his name may be – it is usually a footnote to a much bigger headline name – it is more likely to be found in the back of a shirt, than along the spine of a paperback. The headline name is Issey Miyake. Under it, in smaller print, Takizawa has been the creative mind behind the pioneering Japanese designer’s collections since he was handed the reigns five years ago, allowing Miyake to go off and be creative elsewhere (notably to pursue his A-Poc garment manufacturing philosophy).
Taking over from such a giant in 2000 must have made Takizawa’s chopsticks stand on end – “scary” is how he puts it. “Up until that point I was there to support Miyake in his work. Then you find your name on the label and suddenly you feel the real pressure from the customers, your audience. At that point I realized just what pressure Miyake had had on his shoulders all those years.”
If getting the ultimate promotion was scary, Takizawa’s first day at Issey Miyake must have been absolutely terrifying. After all, Miyake had been designing groundbreaking clothes for 30 years, forming, with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto, that first wave of Japanese influence that revolutionized western conceptions of dress. But then Takizawa was the chosen one, groomed for the position he now fills, his CV remarkably short: the Tokyoite graduated from the Kuwasawa Design Institute when he was 21, joined the Issey Miyake Design Studio the following year and has been there ever since. He is now 45. And, media shy to the end, only recently is he starting to get due recognition.
“When I joined the company every day was running, running, running,” he chuckles. “But every day was also fresh and exciting. Every day I found out something new. It’s been a great education. But it was also very scary. It was a big responsibility. This was the ‘80s and much more was going on in fashion, much more than today: there was more intense competition between designers to show new ideas. And a lot of those ideas, the technology, the concepts were coming from Japan. That made it an interesting place to be. And before you know it, 25 years had passed.”
“My designs would have taken a completely different direction if I hadn’t been at Miyake all this time,” he adds. “Would I like to have worked with other designers? Sure. But that’s less about working for other brands as working in a different, European culture perhaps. I could have learnt yet more then.”
But being one company his whole career – in the Japanese ‘job for life’ tradition – has given him an enviable opportunity to focus. Although now responsible for womenswear too, Takizawa’s menswear has become something of an industry insider’s secret: neither as trendy as those designers who seek to ride a seasonal wave of the latest looks, nor bearing a label that partakes in wine bar one-upmanship, it is nevertheless wearable and dependably interesting without being self-consciously quirky. It is sensual stuff. But this being Japanese, and thus outwardly prudish, the sensuality is all interior.
“Generally, I think body-consciousness is becoming much more of an issue in menswear, since the ‘90s. But my menswear is changing too, if only because as man I get to design what I want for me,” Takizawa adds. “All good menswear is about adapting its traditions because, for instance, nothing much has changed about the construction of a jacket for two or three hundred years. All that really changes is the lining. But what I think is important now is a new softness: suits should be more like T-shirts, trousers like jeans, shoes like sneakers… It’s all about being comfortable, while recognising that our lifestyles need something more formal too.”
Certainly, if the cliché of Japanese clothing is as austere, dark and difficult (“one of the standards of the fashion world in general and not particularly Japanese,” Takizawa suggests), his menswear is detailed, colourful and relaxed, full of texture and craftsmanship. It is futuristic too – fittingly for anything that originates from Japan’s ultra-modern, history-blinkered capital – but not obviously so. If there are two camps in Japanese fashion, one that takes the heritage of western clothing, refines it and sells it back to us, the other that benefits from being free of western sartorial influence for generations and starts with a clean sheet, Takizawa is clearly in the latter.
“The history of clothes as they’re conceived of in the West is not so long for us in Japan and the East,” Takizawa explains. “The first western clothes we had were uniforms – for post-office workers and prisoners – and then we didn’t have any real factories for making clothes. So I think clothes design that has come out of Tokyo has come out really without any history, any manner or way that has railroaded them. It’s been free of all that. Take the western jacket: the way it’s made is all about adhering to certain rules. In Japan we might wash it, damage it, not draped it from the shoulder in the way it’s usually constructed. We can find a more personal, new way of designing clothes, without any kind of prejudice and that Eastern way is the DNA of the designs.”
The creative impulse may not have stretched to the literary just yet, but in the Issey Miyake tradition Takizawa has always looked well beyond the end of his own needle too. Miyake designed uniforms for (somewhat unexpectedly) the Lithuanian team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Takizawa for the likes of the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. Both designers have created costumes for the Ballet Frankfurt – Takizawa received a New York Dance and Performance Award for his costume design. Furthermore, neither designer trained in fashion (Miyake trained as a graphic designer).
There is about such parallels a hint of ‘like father, like son’ and a touch of the Jedi Knights about it all. Miyake has said that more important than a knowledge of clothing in his staff is “an ability to sift out aesthetic things”. Like Miyake (in his trademark dark ensembles every inch a pocket Vader), Takizawa has also been an inveterate collaborator; Miyake with the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang, Takizawa with up-and-coming artists such as Takashi Murakami, Chibo Aoshima and Aya Takano, with architects Seijima and Nishizawa and, on the horizon, with product designers. Companies too, such as the trainer brand (and recent UK arrival) Onitsuka Tiger, have found themselves a part of Team Naoki for a season.
Indeed, Takizawa is adamant that getting out there and seeing what others have to offer is now the way to design. It can’t be done in a bubble. His day, he says, starts about 9:30am and is usually chock full of meetings until 7pm. It is only in the evenings that he is usually free to sketch. But, even if a meeting in cancelled, he doesn’t reach for his pencil: he goes window-shopping, to a gallery or the cinema, or just for a walk. “That’s where the ideas come from,” he says. ‘Nothing happens sitting at the table’ is a kind of maxim for him.
“Collaboration with people from different fields creates kind of vibration between the disciplines, because you’re bringing different processes into view,” he adds. “I’m a fashion designer and that’s different to being an artist – an artist doesn’t care about anything because he’s not concerned about the impact of his work in a customer. I have to think about what’s good for the customer, for the company. But it’s increasingly difficult to put a line between fashion and art these days. A fashion designer has the advantage I think of getting his designs to many more people. ‘Designer’ fashion used to be for the few. Now it’s everywhere and for everyone. Art was for the specialist few too, though a much wider audience is even becoming the way of communication for art too. Tapping into that vibration is a new process for me. It takes me beyond my own limits.”
Plugging other creatives for fresh ideas is also essential within the Miyake environment, in which innovation has been all, be it from the way fabric is folded (as with Miyake’s Pleats Please line) to the way a garment is constructed (clothing made from a single continuous thread, as with the designer’s potentially revolutionary A-Poc), through to advances in textile technology. With such ideas increasingly, inevitably, in short supply, to think in any way other than radically could be fatally out of keeping with the Issey Miyake credo, one which, Takizawa recognises, is “very different from the normal fashion marketing system.” It must be frustrating to anyone trained there to see other major designers lazily rehashing the past. “But it’s hard not to do that,” Takizawa says graciously. “Fashion design is a hard job. And using the past is not a bad thing. It’s more about finding the missing points in the past and recreating them completed for today, so that it becomes a way of designing for the future.”
Radical thinking also helps Takizawa overcome what he regards as his biggest stumbling block: himself. He contends that the more experience he has, the harder it is for him to design. It is telling to note that five years ago Miyake said something that inferred much the same: “I’m over 60 years old,” he remarked, “and my way of thinking has become rather fixed…”
“I think the best fashion design comes through accident,” says Takizawa. “If we have long experience in making clothes we’ve already made many mistakes in the process. So automatically we remember that if we go in a certain direction we’ll hit a wall or go in another direction there’s a problem, and in avoiding those directions you avoid the mistakes. But that makes your design safe. And safe isn’t good in fashion design. You have to follow a certain direction even if you know there’s a wall, or some fire or a dragon at the end. Getting passed those is where the innovation is. Experience can stop you going there. I think it’s the most important point of my work. I can’t work without those accidents.”
It seems an especially fortuitous accident that brought Takizawa to Issey Miyake in the first place. After all, Takizawa had every intention of becoming a sculptor or painter himself, to make the kind of rigid, untouchable works that he so loves fashion precisely for not being. The anecdote has it that one day he saw an Issey Miyake shirt hanging in a shop window and, stunned by its ingenuity, decided on the spot that for him fashion design was where it was at. His path has not been one he has regretted: “I loved making things as a child, always painting, always with a pencil and ink around me for drawing, on the board, on the wall… But that idea to become a painter was only really there before I discovered design. And I’m very happy that I did. In art you can make only one. In design you can make endless copies. So your work goes further, it can be seen on the streets.”
And although Takizawa remains under the shadow of Issey Miyake, it is more the case of being protected by the welcome nurturing of a respected brand than playing second fiddle to the designer himself. Indeed, Takizawa has, as a designer, been cultivated in an environment that appears close to the master/apprentice model of more traditional crafts. Not, as with many other, better known designers, simply brought in to replace a retiring giant whom they have never met, or who may be long dead, Takizawa has been and remains Miyake’s genuine protégé.
“When I started out at Issey Miyake I wasn’t really aware of this idea of being an apprentice,” Takizawa says. “But after Miyake gave me responsibility for design I could see that it was in keeping with the Japanese tradition: continuation of a culture and technique, taking it into tomorrow. It’s very important, especially for Mr. Miyake. He built his own fashion identity and that has to be respected. Of course, I have a different identity and different ideas…” He certainly does. Surely now it is time for the elusive Mr. Takizawa to step into the limelight. He is the master now.
