Her anger fueled her talent—and her ambition. When she became the chief art director for Parco in 1971, she seized the opportunity in remarkable ways: Her campaigns were provocative, beautiful, and subversive. Her defiantly antiproduct ads featured portraits of often naked women with taglines like “Girls Be Ambitious!” or “Don’t Stare at the Nude; Be Naked.” She used models from Morocco, India, and Kenya in native garb, along with New York street kids in their eighties New Wave splendor. In a particularly memorable series with Dunaway from 1979, Eiko photographed the actress in a gold and silver Issey Miyake satin robe and headdress. Dunaway’s arms are spread wide, and two young Japanese children—Eiko’s nieces—are embraced by the folds of her kimono. The girls are wearing red dresses that reveal their nipples, and a red pigment covers their eyes like a mask. The effect is mysterious, grand, and vaguely religious. The ad reads: “Can West Wear East?” “It was a rather bold question,” Eiko later said. “The image looks to the future—to a time when East and West become one.”
By 1983, Eiko had ended her association with Parco, opened her own design firm, and started traveling to New York more often. While she gravitated toward extremes in her costume design, Eiko preferred minimal style for herself. Her apartment overlooking Central Park South, which she bought in 1988, was white on white on white. “There was almost no furniture,” Singh recalled. “And when she showed you her sketches, she put them out on the white floor. You’d walk around in your bare feet, in the white room, deciding on these opulent designs.”
Singh and Eiko met in the late nineties when Singh hunted her down after seeing her work for Dracula, which was only Eiko’s second job as a film costume designer. Francis Ford Coppola had collaborated with Eiko on the poster for the Japanese release of Apocalypse Now and felt her sensibility was crucial for Dracula. “My strategy in hiring her—an independent, a weirdo outsider with no roots in the business—worked,” the director wrote at the time. “The script was envisaged for very young actors, so I said to myself, Let’s spend our money not on sets but on the costumes, because the costumes are closest to the actors. I decided that the costumes would be the set.”
Eiko’s otherworldly outfits did not disappoint: Dracula sports a bloodred sort of muscle armor that resembles anatomy-book drawings, and the promiscuous Lucy wears a party dress embroidered with peppermint green snakes to underscore her eroticism and attraction to evil. “When you make a movie, you don’t get exactly what you want—you never do—you get percentages,” Coppola wrote. “Except for Eiko. She got what she wanted.”
