At Sacai, Chitose Abe Doesn’t Chase the Hype—It Finds Her Anyway

Chitose Abe is sitting at a conference table in a bare-bones office upstairs at the Paris headquarters of her company, Sacai. The building is a Haussmannian-style hôtel particulier with a stately entrance, but the inside is utterly minimal, with Eiffel-like girders holding up the showroom’s glass canopy roof. Abe is beaming, having just soaked up the last of the congratulations for her men’s and women’s presentation, which is a series of looks arranged on rows of mannequins assembled below us. She says, through an interpreter, that her most recent output is “a return to basics.” But that’s always been true of Sacai.

Since she started the company, in 1999, Abe has created her own language of smartly remixed wardrobe staples—tuxedos, sailor-stripe T-shirts, seersucker, denim, and khaki—and has become a designer’s designer in the process. Devotees like Pharrell Williams, Sofia Coppola, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, all instinctively good dressers who have access to everything, still choose her. “They might have contracts with different brands, but they’re friends who want to wear Sacai in their private life. So when they’re in Tokyo, they come to see me,” she says.

The days of fashion editors changing multiple times a day during show season to wear clothes by the house they’re visiting are over. Still, in the crowd downstairs—fashion insiders checking out the collection up close—there are many who are wearing their own Sacai. Before my interview with Abe, I spotted a pleated oxford-striped tennis dress, a reproportioned trench, one of those hybrid striped T-shirts with the draped fabric back that Abe has perfected over the years, and numerous off-the-shoulder poplin shrug tops, on people of all shapes and sizes.

Sacai is often described as an intellectual brand. Maybe that’s because Abe’s pieces are never just one thing—in fact, they often contain several contrasting statements. Delicacy meets strength in tailoring with sheer inserts that reveal flashes of skin; workwear goes sensual through draping and slouch. Yet, for all their symbols and signifiers, the clothes don’t wear their owners. “Chitose makes quite masculine ideas feel very sensual, and also new and unexpected,” says Anita Templer, a branding consultant who was a loyal Sacai customer long before she started collaborating with Abe on retail and media strategy. “There’s something artful about her clothes, but they’re relatable and easy to wear. I have this bomber jacket with a sweater detail on the front, and I must have had 30 people stop me in the street to ask where it was from. I think it’s to do with her being a woman and wearing the clothes herself. She’s a working mom. She likes to go out in the evening. She likes to dance. Some people might lazily reach a conclusion that if it’s design that comes from Japan, there has to be something somber or strict about it, but there’s a happiness and lightness to Sacai.”

Abe was her own unfussy muse when she started customizing her clothes as a teenager, and she launched Sacai to indulge her desire to rethink the basics she always loved. Back then, her dress code was “simple clothes: dress shirts, chinos, cardigans,” she explains. She had left her job as a patternmaker at Comme des Garçons after finding out she was pregnant, and was home with her daughter when she started Sacai, initially with a small range of knitwear. She would try out her designs on tiny dolls. “There were so many brands and so many clothes around the world when I started,” she says. “I wanted to create something that didn’t exist, something new and interesting, but that I would wear in daily life.”

Today that’s an asymmetric black ruffle skirt with an oversize black men’s T-shirt that reads all day, every day, a nod to Abe’s firm belief that clothes should be completely versatile. It’s low-key until you get into the details, like the delicate knife pleats of the ruffles on the skirt, which swirl onto themselves, or the neck of her tee, stretched out just so. The quiet subtlety vanishes, though, when you get to Abe’s wrist, where there’s a magnificent, giant honking watch I can’t stop staring at. It’s a men’s Rolex GMT-Master II in heavy yellow gold, the lug covered in pavé diamonds, the bezel ringed in emerald-cut rubies and sapphires.

I tell Abe it’s fabulous, and she whips it off her wrist and hands it to me with a big smile. “It’s heavy,” she says. “I got it 15 years ago. It wasn’t a special occasion, but I fell in love with it and felt like I would regret it if I let it go. It wasn’t cheap, but I felt like it was worth it.”

No need to apologize or justify. Sacai is a very successful business, and Abe is its sole owner. Back when there were just a few employees, Abe did the books herself; now the brand employs 160 people, is stocked in more than 35 countries, and has ongoing capsule collaborations with Nike, Carhartt WIP, Astier de Villatte, and J.M. Weston. Many of these came about through friends like Fraser Cooke, a director of special projects at Nike. “Our marketing approach is very personal,” says Abe.

It would have to be, because for all her boldface admirers, Abe is deeply unthirsty. She doesn’t bother with the red carpet. She doesn’t do social media. She doesn’t even know who any of the new stars or influencers are. “I don’t have all that much information,” she says. “Whenever the team talks about celebrities, I don’t know who anybody is.”

Abe wasn’t even that clear on what Labubu was when her friend Federico Tan, the Hong Kong–based art world connector, gave her one of the dolls with the idea to broker an introduction to Labubu’s designer, the artist Kasing Lung. Next thing you know, Abe had put 14 hysteria-inducing Labubus onto Sacai x Carhartt WIP knit jumpsuits and star necklaces that were sold at a UNESCO charity auction through Pharrell Williams’s online platform, Joopiter, in collaboration with the K-pop group Seventeen. They went for $30,000 each. “We weren’t really familiar with this chaos of Labubu in the world,” says Abe. “It was just a friendly conversation.”

Abe’s team, which includes a network of textile suppliers with whom she creates her own fabrics, has been with her for a long time. When she talks about her inspiration, success, or longevity, she always refers to her collaborators. Her circle extends to the creatives she taps for her lookbooks and runway shows. Karl Templer, who styled this photo shoot, has worked on all of Sacai’s presentations since Abe’s first, in 2011. That show came about through the advice of Sarah Andelman, who was then running the legendary Parisian boutique Colette. “Sarah is a big supporter of Sacai still,” says Abe, “and gave very wise advice to me: If you don’t show your clothes to the world, somebody will start copying Sacai, and then Sacai might be seen as copying them. She did really push me to show in a runway format so that people could actually see what we were doing.”

Abe credits that decision as one of the biggest boosts of her career. Templer already had a very good feel for the clothes, because Anita Templer, Abe’s collaborator, is his wife. “Anita had been buying Chitose’s pieces from Dover Street Market for a while, and I was always impressed with how the attitude of the clothes stood out,” he says. “Chitose has such a strong design signature and the ability to revisit archetypes and proportion, rearranging them to create desire constantly. Observers think it’s the styling, but the pieces are just designed that way, so that when you wear them you feel that little bit more in the know and fashionable and special.”

I tell Abe that I admire how she’s been able to stay the course aesthetically for so many years and ask her if it’s a Japanese thing, because so many of the fashion houses with real creative longevity and rock-solid DNA were founded by her countrymen: Junya Watanabe, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons. Her answer is typically earthbound: “We tend to think that keeping brand ownership is part of the authenticity.”

There’s no question that to maintain your true north through fashion’s increasingly choppy waters, it helps to own the boat. For Abe, it also helps to go to karaoke regularly—lately, she’s been performing songs by the Japanese pop star Aiko—and to play with Legos. There is a bunch of red Lego roses Abe constructed in a Sacai x Astier de Villatte pitcher downstairs in the showroom. Generally, though, she prefers the old-school blocks to the custom kits of today. They’re freer and allow for more imagination.

Hair by Guido for Zara Hair; makeup by Jennifer Bradburn. Models: Betsy Gaghan and Jacqui Hooper at Next Management. Casting by DM Casting Piergiorgio Del Moro. Set design by Sophear at Art + Commerce.

Produced by Endorphyn; Producers: Magali Mennessier, Emanuela Polo; Photo Assistants: Shri Prasham Parameshwaran, Margaux Jouanneau, Charles Hardouin, Jakub Fulin; Digital Technician: Victor Gauthier; On-Set Retoucher: Ines Leroy Galan; postproduction: DFactory; Fashion Assistants: Brandon Williams, Florence Armstrong; makeup assistant: Mical Klip; Set Assistants: Victor Leverrier, Julian Harold.