Sacai’s Chitose Abe on bridging streetwear and high fashion, the brand’s partnerships ranging from Cartier to a café, and why strategic thinking is boring

This authentic, almost childlike approach to asking others to work with her pays off. One of her most noteworthy Sacai partnerships was with Cartier—a versatile collection of layered bands, rings and ear cuffs that the designer still wears daily. “Cartier is a brand that I’ve been wearing for ages, and I simply wanted to have a collaboration with them, so we reached out to the CEO in France and surprisingly, [it happened],” Abe remembers with a laugh. “[Another example is] Dior Men; Kim Jones has been a really good friend for years. And we had been having this conversation about doing something together since he was at Louis Vuitton; then it just so happened when he was at Dior.” We asked her where she can go next, given the range of brands and products she’s worked with already. The designer refuses to be boxed in by an answer. “Once you start thinking strategically, it’s going to be boring.”

She may have perfected the art of working with others, but that does nothing to take away from her own skills as a designer. Having cut her teeth at the avant-garde Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons and later at Junya Watanabe before starting Sacai, Abe has consistently proven her fresh perspective, slowly and steadily bridging streetwear and high fashion, and always staying true to the utilitarian sensibility that has made her one of the most prominent Japanese contemporary designers since her debut. “The most important thing for the brand, from the beginning, has been to always start from something familiar or archetypal, and to create a completely new silhouette or something unexpected,” she says.

This approach has been at the forefront of the Sacai philosophy, seen in her unique collage of garment types, fabrics, cuts and patterns, often summed up as hybrid clothing.

For the latest spring-summer 2024 collection, Abe focused on straightforward and simple pieces. Drawing inspiration from circular pattern cutting, she used everyday fabrics including denim and shirting to sculpt innovative cocoons and balloon-esque silhouettes. Abe combined camisoles and slip dresses with outer coat/shirt components for a relaxed yet elegant attitude. “I was inspired by this phrase by Auguste Rodin that we actually had [printed on] some garments: ‘The more simple we are, the more complete we become’,” she adds.

Many major brands struggle to maintain a consistent aesthetic, but Abe, who started her design career in the late Nineties, doesn’t feel that hers has changed at all, even in the social media era. Instead of approaching celebrities as ambassadors, the Sacai social media page is more about real people and friends of the brand, which do happen to include the megastar and current creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear Pharrell Williams and legendary actor Tony Leung, who sport Sacai pieces in daily life. “We work on social media now in a very comfortable, very organic way. We do understand it’s very important,” says Abe, adding, however, that the company makes content in a way that is “true to ourselves”, and that the support of its good friends is less marketing than a natural result of long-term friendship.

While she is very much the brains behind the brand and its success, Abe is keen to highlight those beyond Sacai who helped grow its global position. Sarah Andelman of Colette, Paris’s premier fashion pitstop and home to many up-and-coming designers, pushed Sacai when there wasn’t a retail business to expand in the early 2000s. “Sarah told me that we need to expand into the market, otherwise people will start copying our products,” Abe says. “The second [huge boost] is when we were lucky enough to start working with a stylist called Karl Templer, who we still work with for the runway shows. He brought us a lot, including introducing us to many talents.”

Abe considers the brand’s biggest milestone of recent years to be the community it has helped build. “In the past five years, we were able to make our team very strong, not just within the company, but [we are] also surrounded by very supportive friends, people who we work with daily [outside the company], and very talented friends like Pharrell or Kim Jones,” she explains. The designer has been discreet about discussing other designers, but when we mention Williams, who tends to “visit the showroom and stay for hours with his friends when he’s in Tokyo”, her face lights up. “I feel that everybody [I know] used to not be this famous and then suddenly, everybody became famous. But we’ve known each other for a long time.”

Maybe the secret to keeping on winning is what was written in her spring-summer 2024 show notes: “The underlying message that underpins and forms the foundation of Abe’s thinking? Always, irrefutably, and forever, ‘Love is best’.”

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