Sacai and Undercover designers pair up for debut show at Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo
Chitose Abe and Jun Takahashi put on debut joint spring-summer 2018 show in Tokyo, echoing Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s collaboration in 1991
For designers Chitose Abe of Sacai and Jun Takahashi of Undercover, the Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo was a homecoming of sorts.
Sacai: the new look of Japanese fashion
Two of Japan’s best fashion exports showed their spring/summer 2018 collections in a joint show for the first time in their own country, just weeks after showing them in Paris.
The last time an event caused such a stir was in 1991 when Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo put on a men’s show together in Tokyo.
Both Abe and Takahashi are Kawakubo protégés – the former having worked for Comme des Garcons in the 1990s under Kawakubo, the latter mentored by Kawakubo since his debut collection in 1994.
“I still remember the shock when I saw 6.1 The Men up close 26 years ago,” says Abe of the Yamamoto-Kawakubo 1991 collaboration.
For Takahashi, it was a chance to create history. “For the first time in 15 years, I finally decided to do my fashion show in the Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo programme even though I have been getting requests to do fashion shows in Tokyo for several years,” he says. “I offered to collaborate with Ms Abe from Sacai and she agreeably accepted.”