It should come as no surprise that a fashion designer who once incorporated live elephants into his runway show would release 350 butterflies into a candle-lit tent dotted with cherry blossom trees for his 80th birthday celebration. And yet, on February 28, inside the Pavillon Ledoyen just off the Champs-Elysées, hundreds of sparkly-dressed Parisians stood there, bewildered by the electrifying spectacle unleashed by Kenzo Takada, who spent decades disrupting the fashion world with his eponymous label’s bold patterns and out-there designs.
In honor of Takada’s eight-decade milestone, the Tokyo-raised, Paris-based icon recently released a mostly visual, 464-page self-titled tome about his life and work. The book meanders from Takada’s 1965 arrival in Paris by boat at the age of 26, through the ‘70s when he organized a catwalk for the opening of Studio 54 in New York, to his last show in 1999 after which his focus shifted to home decor, fragrance and, quite simply, living la belle vie in Paris…