The Great Fashion Designers (29 page)

In 1970, with two fellow graduates of the Bunka, Atsuko Kondo and Atsuko Ansai, he launched the first Jungle Jap boutique in Galerie Vivienne near the Palais Royal. Its interior was inspired by the darkly threatening, exotically tropical dreamscape paintings of Le Douanier Rousseau and hinted mischievously at the nature of the clothes. He could not afford to buy the fabrics he wanted, so he bought some at flea markets and went back to Japan for some, buying printed cottons and silks, cutting them in fresh, simple, youthful styles and mixing new and old. This was the genesis of the Kenzo style which was to revitalise Paris fashion. In a first collection that was all about getting the attention of the press, he mixed plaids and florals, stripes and checks in a way that was reminiscent of how the geishas of his childhood layered their many brightly coloured, richly printed and embroidered kimonos, unafraid of colour clashes or the juxtaposition of patterns that refused to speak to each other.

Trained by his time at Sanai to the concept of fast-paced constantly renewed fashion, Kenzo produced five collections in his first year. He was an instant sensation, the darling of a fashion press that found what he had to offer exactly right for the times. From the kimono he also derived his cuts—all straight lines and simple squares. Reflecting on the birth of his signature style, he wrote in
Liberté: Kenzo
in 1987, ‘No more darts, I like bold, straight lines. Use cotton for summer and no lining for winter. Combine bright colours together, combine flowers, stripes and checks freely. This was the beginning of my style.'

The American press called his style ‘kicky', probably because the models used to love the clothes so much they would bounce and twirl, grinning broadly, down the catwalk. To Kenzo can be attributed many of the key looks of the 1970s: tunics;
Mao collars; layered looks; shawls and long, lushly patterned jacquard-woven scarves; Peruvian knits in vibrant colours; bobbles; big, big, square-cut jumpers; loose waistcoats; kimono-cut sleeves; baggy trousers; ingénue taffeta frocks bedecked with frills and flounces and folkloric and peasant looks inspired by traditional dress from all over the world. Mid-decade he was credited with introducing the unconstructed Big Look based on one-size-fits-all voluminous garments, a long, circular skirt worn with braces, topped with big shirts, big coats and capes that cut a dash as the wearer moved. ‘Much too big is the right size,' Kenzo told
Vogue
in 1975, loosening his look even further with tent dresses, smocks and enormous striped dungarees with ‘elephant' legs worn with thick-soled sandals.

The Big Look bombed in the United States but swept the rest of the fashionable world. However by the next year Kenzo was in a Tyrolean mood, cutting jackets closer to the body, starting a run on loden, boiled wool, braided trim and appliqué and introducing the hip-slung belt which, once again, the whole fashion world emulated. By 1978 he was playing with military looks based on Morocco's Zouave soldiers with their voluminous striped jodhpurs and romantically full-sleeved shirts crisscrossed by bandoliers. By this point international fashion had gone seriously fancy-dress and sentimentally retrospective. For winter that year Kenzo showed white Nehru suits and swaggering, ruffled pirate shirts over narrow breeches.

The 1980s brought recession and the dress-for-success phenomenon born of a competitive workplace and women's determination to shatter the glass ceiling that barred their route to the top of the professions and the business world. One strand of fashion became deadly serious and found many ways to ape the male business suit in an attempt to imply authority. This was the moment when minimalist designers like Calvin Klein, Armani and Zoran became dominant while iconoclastic designers in London, and then Antwerp and Japan began to challenge ideas of acceptable dressing and the fashion system itself. Another strand of establishment fashion became flirtatious, following the lead of Norma Kamali's ra-ra look and making skirts shorter and flouncier and accessories cuter, girlier, almost infantilised. Kenzo found his place in the latter camp, doing easy, sporty collections that were still youthful, still pretty, still naive—possibly too naive for the decade—and consequently his importance began to wane.

In 1982 Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto showed in Paris for the first time. They, with Issey Miyake, became the definitive Japanese designers. ‘Comme and Yohji were a big shock to the system,' Kenzo told Alicia Drake in 2006, ‘but in a way I am closer to them. At least I understood their construction of the garment. But what really threw me were Mugler and Montana and then Azzedine. They were doing clothes that were beautiful, sublime, but they were clothes that I really
cannot
do, clothes that were so highly structured. For me someone like Montana was the polar opposite of what I was doing. Fashion had changed completely.'

Yuniya Kawamura, writing in 2004, summed up Kenzo's contribution succinctly, ‘Kenzo was the first to bring to the West what was not considered to be fashionable in Japan, and he was able to turn it into fashion. He may not have been as radical or avant-garde as other designers who followed him, but he showed that making something unfashionable into fashionable depends on the context in which the clothes are placed and the process that the clothes have gone through.'

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Kenzo's importance declined as he attempted to keep pace with fashion's moods while remaining true to his own vision. He retired in 1999, selling his company to LVMH and heading off to polish his painting and golfing skills. He said his goodbyes with characteristic exuberance, renting a Parisian theatre for the party, filling it with balloons and belly dancers and riding off into the sunset on the back of an elephant. The line is currently designed by Antonio Marras, an Italian.

Further reading:
Ginette Sainderichin's
Kenzo
(1998), part of the Fashion Memoir series, for focus and Yuniya Kawamura's
The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion
(2004) for background.

In September 2007 Ralph Lauren celebrated his fortieth anniversary as the king of American fashion by reprising his favourite fantasy worlds in New York's Central Park, taking over the historic Conservatory Garden for the presentation of his spring/summer 2008 fashion show and a black tie dinner under the stars. The guest list was as glittering as even Lauren could have desired. It included the actors Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, Lauren Bush (then dating David Lauren), the talk show host Barbara Walters, the homemaker-tycoon Martha Stewart, Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband Matthew Broderick and fellow American designers, including Donna Karan, Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera. Designer Diane von Furstenberg declared, ‘He's as American as Coca-Cola.'

Well, not quite. The man who started his business career by designing ties in the Bronx and now heads one of the world's most successful fashion and lifestyle companies, valued in excess of $4 billion, chose a thoroughly British theme for this career-crowning occasion. The fashion show was staged in a giant marquee against a painted backdrop which represented Royal Ascot Opening Day at the turn of the century and, in a reference to Cecil Beaton's famous black-and-white Ascot scene from the film,
My Fair Lady
, the show opened with a model wearing a black picture hat and a black and white, ruffled hourglass gown and carrying a silver-topped cane. Some of the supporting cast were dressed as turf club dandies in immaculately tailored jackets and jodhpurs, accessorised with monocles, watch chains draped over fitted waistcoats, top hats, cravats and spat-style boots. Then came the riders in rose-pink jodhpurs encrusted with silver embroidery and a series of dazzling horse-print silks worn with tailored breeches and T-shirt dresses accessorised with riding hats.

Lauren then moved on to revisit some of the other major themes of his extraordinary career: the 1920s of both the Great Gatsby and jazz age Paris, the English country house scene of the 1930s, genteel garden parties and grand balls. It was not quite all the lost worlds Lauren has spent a lifetime persuading people they want to inhabit but some of the most evocative. He left out the prairies of the nineteenth century with its pioneer women in blanket coats, flounced skirts, ruffled blouses, silver and turquoise accessories and cowboy boots; the plains of Africa in the 1930s with its effete aristocrats, safari gear and cool white linens and the hints of Happy Valley set decadence; the New England hunting set with strictly tailored red redingotes; Hollywood's golden age with its glamour queens in their bias-cut slip dresses; the traditional American backwoods rough-wear of plaid jackets and time-honoured knitwear, cabled, Fair Isle, Navajo-patterned, over soft shirting, corduroy pants and denim jeans and skirts; and many more worlds that once existed but not quite as beautifully as Lauren imagines them.

Ralph Lauren is the great romantic of American fashion, a myth-maker whose own sensitivity to how clothes and artefacts define an era and its people have allowed him to recreate those eras—if not exactly those people—in his clothing collections, his complete-world home ranges, his elite theme-park stores and most powerfully in his advertising
campaigns. He is a designer whose lyrical vision is capable of sweeping along the most minimalist of modernists in its technicoloured embrace. As Jane Mulvagh put it, ‘He launched a look that endowed American and European utility and sports garments with nostalgic appeal. “I paint dreams. These clothes have a heritage, they're not frivolous but things to treasure even when they get old,” he said.'

Colin McDowell, in his monograph on the designer, wrote:

Refreshingly he has separated dress from the tyranny of fashion dictatorship. He has looked specifically at what makes American fashion not only different but unique: sportswear, casual elegance, the luxury of simplicity married to the highest level of workmanship and the very best of fabrics and materials—and he emphasised the timelessness inherent in it … But the skills of Ralph Lauren are not confined to clothes alone. He has taught us how to create our surroundings, he has educated our taste and he has revolutionised the way we shop.

He was the first to understand what has since been labelled ‘experiential' shopping; we may take away a product in a bag but what we are really buying into is the experience offered to us by the constructed ambiance of the shop—whether it be a gentleman's club or a safari tent.

Lauren was born in 1939, in the Bronx, New York, the fourth and last child of recent immigrants from Russia, Frank and Frieda Lifshitz. Frank was a highly skilled decorator, a specialist in wood grain and marble effects. Ralph was an ordinary little boy who liked to play ball with his brothers and the neighbourhood guys. He did not, as so many other important designers did, make clothes for his sister's dolls. However, according to school friends Lauren's fashion sense was apparent at an early age when he would buy himself expensive suits with the money he earned working at his after-school job. Looking stylish was a priority.

McDowell establishes two patterns of behaviour in the boy which were to shape the man. He had a fertile fantasy life and totally immersed himself in the role of the moment, playing baseball as his hero, Mickey Mantle; sword-fighting his brothers as the Duke of York ‘or some other duke'; and boxing, as Joe Louis, with his brother who was Sugar Ray Robinson. And, second, he began quite naturally to invest clothes with talismanic qualities, deriving a sense of identity and provenance from his brother's well-worn hand-me-downs. ‘You don't need,' wrote McDowell, ‘a crystal ball to see this as the beginning of a cultural approach that was to be the basis of the Polo Ralph Lauren empire, predicated as it is on the assumption that, while fashion is fickle, “real” clothes are better because they exemplify continuity. How many times has Ralph Lauren said that he responds to old, well-worn clothes and dislikes the concept of fashion because it presupposes newness?'

Ralph's brothers changed their name to Lauren while he was still a teenager, and he followed suit. By the time he finished high school, he realised that his dream of an athletic career was unlikely to be realised, so he enrolled at City College in Manhattan to study business management, dropping out before getting his degree. While waiting to be drafted into the military, he got a job at Brooks Brothers, a store whose merchandise—all the elements of the classic, upper-crust gentleman's wardrobe—was identified with a customer base that had gone to prep school and an East Coast Ivy League university. This was where the so-called preppie look of the early 1980s was spawned. It enchanted the young Ralph Lauren. ‘I thought it was like Mecca,' he said. ‘It was just, “Wow!” ‘

He was called up into the army reserve and on being discharged in 1964 took a series of jobs that led to the one with a tie manufacturer named Abe Rivetz, for whom he began designing wide ‘kipper' ties that called for a ‘big knot'; Rivetz told him: ‘The world's not ready for you, Ralph.' So in 1967, he borrowed $50,000 and launched his own range of ties, which he sold to Bloomingdale's. ‘They cost $20 in an era when men's ties were $5. I made the best stuff in America because I believed that beautiful things could be made here,' he said. He called his fledgling company Polo, because he wanted a sporty, classy name, and because
he always saw himself as the dashing hero of the chukka. The movie of his own life was on a continuous loop in Lauren's imagination, the script endlessly tweaked, endlessly varied, its location shifting regularly. In 2008 he told Lesley White of the
Sunday Times
, ‘When I started with clothes, it wasn't necessarily a fashion message. It was how would I like my kids to grow up? How do I spend my weekends?'