Kenzo

Kenzo opened in 1970 in Paris, founded by Japanese designer Kenzo Takada, who had moved from Tokyo in 1964 and created his first collection from $200 worth of fabric bought at the Marché Saint-Pierre in Montmartre.

The original shop, Jungle Jap, sat in Galerie Vivienne and was painted top to bottom with lush vegetation inspired by Henri Rousseau’s The Dream. Elle put one of his designs on its cover in June 1970, and by the middle of the decade the press had labeled his voluminous mid-seventies silhouette the “Big Look,” a shift that reshaped ready-to-wear away from the space-age aesthetic of the 1960s.

Menswear launched in 1983 and drew from the same formula that made the women’s collections work, bold prints, loose proportions, cotton poplin and piqué, kimono-inflected outerwear, and tailored sportswear built around East-West fusion. A children’s line and jeans for men and women followed in 1986, and Kenzo pour Homme fragrance arrived in 1991.

That positioning placed Kenzo alongside Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake as one of the Japanese designers who made Paris their base and broke open European fashion to non-Western tailoring. Takada was named a Knight of the Legion of Honour for his contributions to French culture, and the tiger motif introduced by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim in 2012 became one of the most recognizable graphics in luxury fashion.

LVMH acquired Kenzo in 1993, and Takada retired in 1999. The brand moved through Gilles Rosier and Roy Krejberg, then Antonio Marras from 2008 to 2011, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of Opening Ceremony from 2011 to 2019, and Felipe Oliveira Baptista from 2019 to 2021. Nigo, the Japanese designer behind A Bathing Ape and Human Made, was appointed artistic director in 2021, becoming the first Japanese designer to lead the house since its founder.

British designer Joshua A. Bullen, formerly of Givenchy and Stone Island, joined as head of design in 2025. Today Kenzo dresses the menswear shopper through varsity jackets, utility vests, denim, tatami prints, and graphic knitwear built around Nigo’s Japan-meets-Americana framework, sitting in LVMH’s portfolio alongside Loewe and Celine as a designer label with streetwear fluency. It holds the position of the original Japanese house in Paris, a legacy built on bringing color, volume, and non-Western craft into European ready-to-wear.