Chitose Abe

Chitose Abe was born on November 9, 1965, in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and joined Comme des Garçons in 1989 as a pattern cutter — the person who translates a designer’s vision into the precise geometry of flat fabric that, when assembled, produces a three-dimensional garment. She spent eight years inside the CdG system, including five years on Junya Watanabe’s team after he received his own label in 1991, and the education she absorbed — Kawakubo’s conceptual rigor, Watanabe’s technical innovation, the house’s conviction that fashion is an intellectual discipline rather than a commercial one — would inform everything she subsequently built, even as she built something that neither of her mentors would have produced.

She left Comme des Garçons in 1997 because she was pregnant with her daughter Toko and felt she could not maintain the intensity the house demanded while becoming a mother. She spent two years at home — isolated, she has said, by the domesticity that Japanese culture expected of her — before her husband Junichi Abe, who had been her colleague on Watanabe’s team, encouraged her to make “three or five special pieces.” She bought a three-thousand-yen yarn pack from Yuzawaya, a craft shop, and hand-knitted five pieces in her apartment in Nakameguro, Tokyo. Those five pieces became the first Sacai collection in 1999. The name is a play on her maiden surname, Sakai.

The technique that defines Sacai — and that distinguishes Abe from the CdG lineage that trained her — is hybridization: taking elements from two different garments, often in clashing fabrics and from incompatible traditions, and splicing them together into a single piece that is larger than the sum of its parts. A bomber jacket’s back meets a trench coat’s front. A cable-knit sweater dissolves into a pleated skirt. A military parka’s shoulders carry a quilted liner that belongs to a different garment entirely. The construction requires pattern-cutting skills of extraordinary precision — each hybrid must accommodate two different structural logics within a single silhouette — and the fact that Abe spent eight years cutting patterns at CdG before she ever designed a garment of her own explains why her hybrids hold together where imitations fall apart. She has cited kintsugi — the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold seams, celebrating the repair rather than concealing it — as a metaphor for her design process, and the metaphor is exact: Sacai garments do not hide their seams. The splice is the design.

The brand’s growth followed a trajectory that was slow by industry standards and rapid by the standards of a label that began with five hand-knitted pieces. By 2009 — a decade after founding — Sacai was picked up by Barneys New York and Colette Paris after a well-received Autumn/Winter 2009 show in Tokyo. In 2011, she showed her first full runway collection in Paris, and Dover Street Market — which had been one of the first stores to carry Sacai outside Asia — gave the brand its first dedicated international retail space. A men’s line launched in 2009. A flagship store opened in Minamiaoyama, Tokyo, in September 2011, designed by architect Sou Fujimoto in raw concrete, glass, and white walls with live plants. The brand now distributes through over two hundred stores worldwide and a hundred and seventy-five international retailers.

The Nike collaboration is the most commercially significant partnership in Sacai’s history and one of the most successful in contemporary sneaker culture. The first Nike x Sacai release in 2015 included the Air Max 90 and Dunk High Lux. The LDWaffle — which debuted on the Spring/Summer 2019 Paris runway and combined Nike’s LDV and Waffle silhouettes into a doubled, stacked sneaker with two tongues, two Swooshes, and two midsoles — sold out instantly and established the visual template for subsequent collaborations including the VaporWaffle of 2020, which merged the Pegasus and Vaporfly. Additional collaborations with The North Face, Moncler, and a fifty-seven-piece capsule with Kim Jones at Dior in 2021 confirmed Sacai’s position as the collaboration partner of choice for brands seeking technical sophistication rather than logo placement.

Abe is part of a generation of Japanese designers — alongside Takahiro Miyashita, Hiroki Nakamura, and Fumito Ganryu — who were trained within the CdG system and subsequently established independent practices that extend its logic in directions Kawakubo herself did not pursue. Where Kawakubo deconstructs to interrogate and Watanabe deconstructs to recombine, Abe hybridizes — her garments do not take things apart or put them back together but fuse them, creating objects that belong to two categories simultaneously and resolve the tension between them not through compromise but through the sheer technical conviction that if you cut precisely enough, anything can be joined to anything else. The five hand-knitted pieces from the Yuzawaya yarn pack are now twenty-five years and two hundred stores away, but the principle has not changed: start with what you have, combine it with what it was never meant to touch, and trust the seam.